Despite it’s inclination towards natural and rural connotations, wine can sometimes be, very much, an industriously conceived product. Not to say that wine is made to a recipe, much the same as Coke or a McDonald’s cheeseburger (although some certainly are), but when you consider the amount of allowable additives that a winemaker can legally utilise to make their wines taste, smell, and look a certain way, you begin to realise that some wines move well beyond their pastoral ideals.
This week, in the U.S., Ridge Vineyards, in California, took the step many wine producers are not quite ready to take by listing the entire ingredients of their wines on their labels. Christopher Watkins, Manager of Retail Sales & Hospitality for Ridge Vineyards, and host of the Ridge blog, explained the motivations behind Ridge’s labelling decisions as “to demonstrate how little intervention is necessary to produce a fine, terroir-driven wine from distinctive fruit”.
In Australia, wine is regulated by Food Standards Australia New Zealand, an independent statutory agency, which is a part of the Australian Federal Government. The agency “regulates the use of ingredients, processing aids, colourings, additives, vitamins and minerals… (and) also covers the composition of some foods e.g. dairy, meat and beverages as well as standards developed by new technologies such as genetically modified foods”. They are also “responsible for labelling for both packaged and unpackaged food, including specific mandatory warnings or advisory labels”.
Additives, according to the Australian Wine Research Institute, “are generally added during winemaking to modify or negate the influence of environmental and harvesting factors, which can adversely affect the quality of the grapes and the resultant wine”.
As a winemaker, there are many things you can add to the winemaking process in order to achieve a quality end result. You can add sulphur to the fruit before it has even left the vineyard in order to prevent oxidation and other unwanted microbial activity because the fruit may be bruised, split or broken due to the roughshod methods of a mechanical harvester. Once back in the winery you can add manufactured packet yeasts to kick off the ferment; you can add various enzymes in order to speed up the removal of solid particles from the juice; you can put in additives which will enhance texture, increase or decrease tannin, boost colour, and add clarity; you can add sugar, as well as other nutrients to prolong the ferment, increase alcohol content, and sweetness; you can add packet tartaric acids if you find that the natural acids are lacking; you can add water if there’s too much alcohol; you can add oak extracts for further flavour and tannin adjustment, as well as other compounds, which are supposed to “fix” colour, aroma and body.
None of these additives need to be labelled accordingly on a wine bottle.
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So, should any, or all of these additives be listed on the back of a bottle of wine? Would you even care if they were?
In an article by Max Allen for Weekend Australia’s ‘A Plus Weekend’, first published in December 2011, plenty of readers responded to questions like these, with many voicing concern over the lack of ingredients labeling on wine.“I think it’s only fair that we wine drinkers should be able to easily tell which winemakers are brave enough to let the grapes speak for themselves, rather than manipulate the juice to fit their ideal through the use of a cocktail of chemicals,” one responder wrote in to Max.
Other responders to Max’s questions were less convinced that full disclosure was the best way to address consumer concerns, “No, wine makers should not list all the ingredients and processing aids,” wrote one reader, an industrial chemist. “Take diammonium phosphate. That sounds like a ‘chemical’ so it must be bad for you, right? In fact it’s a yeast nutrient and there’s none left in the wine by the end of the fermentation process. I’m sure that the more these additives are referred to in ‘chemical’ terms, the more the public will view the product as synthetic rather than natural. To reduce a wine to a list of its component ingredients is to reduce it to a science, not to elevate the art”.
Wine writer, Mike Bennie believes that the recent moves by Ridge Vineyards, and others, won’t be a game changer by any means, but it may go someway to “titillate some and could stimulate a response from other similar producers to follow suit”. But as far as consumers are concerned, “labelling ingredients for the most part will be overlooked… until it is uniform for all wine labels”.
“If you ask me whether I would personally welcome the labelling of wines” Mike continues, “then yes, I think that, as a consumable, good wine should be equally treated as any food product that requires labelling and details of content – for me, process and provenance is part of my purchasing decision and I would embrace wine content labelling for such”.
“I’d be very happy to do it”, says Ross McDonald, winemaker at Macquariedale Organic Wines, “transparency is good, and the more transparent we can be, the better off we are”. Ross is careful, however, not to encourage more, potentially unnecessary, regulation of the industry, preferring to leave it up to the individual winemaker to make a decision as to how they feel about marketing their product, “I’m against incurring more expense for people to analyse it, and more regulation… but to let people know what’s in it, is a good idea”, says Ross.
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For me, as The Wine Idealist, I believe that ingredient’s labelling on wines is a positive thing, and I applaud the efforts of Ridge Vineyards, and others, for taking the step and listing the ingredients and additives on their labels, but I am also wary about unnecessary regulation, of anything. I also agree with Mike Bennie that, “labelling wine is fraught with a ‘holier than thou’ approach”, and we must be careful to discern between the honest intentions of transparency by some, and the manipulative provocation by others.
The most important issue, I think, is authenticity, and expressing the true nature of the vineyard, and it’s surrounding landscape, within the bottle. By relying too heavily on synthetic additives, and chemicals, in order to bring wines up to a particular quality is detrimental to the art of winemaking, and disrespectful to the gifts from nature that allow us to enjoy such a privileged, and pleasurable joy.
D// – The Wine Idealist
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