San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Don’t believe the ‘clean’ hype
Cameron Diaz’s new wine Avaline meets none of the natural wine standards
It was only a matter of time. “Clean wine,” as a marketing ploy, was just waiting to be exploited by some opportunistic company. How could it not be? We’ve seen the astonishing success of “clean eating” as a sales tactic — it’s worked for megabrands like Panera and Campbell’s Soup — not to mention the growing popularity in recent years of natural wine, with its noadditive, fulltransparency mantra.
So it seemed inevitable that someone would come along and capitalize on the “clean” allure to hook mainstream wine drinkers, whether or not the wine in question could truthfully be described as clean.
And maybe it was inevitable, too, that that someone would be Cameron Diaz, who has spent the last decade building herself into a lifestyle and wellness guru and has a wide enough reach to actually make the term “clean wine” sound believable.
With her friend Katherine Power — the CEO of fashion company Who What Wear — the “There’s Something About Mary” actor has now launched Avaline, a wine brand founded on “ingredient transparency,” featuring a Spanish white blend (Xarello, Macabeo, Malvasia) and a French rosé (the varieties include Grenache and Cinsault). Diaz is far from the only celebrity with a cute rosé brand: She joins a long list that includes Jon Bon Jovi, Sarah Jessica Parker and Post Malone. But Avaline promises to be different, and it cashes in the healthyliving currency that Diaz has gained with her wellness tomes “The Body Book” and “The Longevity Book”: The Avaline wines are, according to the press release, “clean, delicious, veganfriendly, made with organic grapes and free of unnecessary additives.”
Predictably, many in the media swooned. “Cameron Diaz Just Released an UltraChic, SummerReady Line of Wines,” the Harper’s Bazaar headline read. InStyle’s announcement seemed to imply that the rest of us are drinking a very unclean beverage: “Cameron Diaz and Katherine Power Were Grossed Out By What Was In Wine, So They Made Their Own.”
Diaz’s particular strain of celebrity lifestyle brand is based on the premise that her advice is “grounded in science,” and now that she’s dabbling in wine, she seems eager to apply the same downtoearth mythbusting style that she shared in her books. “When your mouth turns purple from drinking red wine? That’s not natural,” Diaz told InStyle. “That’s a coloring called Mega Purple.”
But don’t be fooled: The claims are a hoax at worst and ignorant at best. Avaline is no more “clean” than the average bottle of wine you’d find on a grocerystore shelf and no more “natural” than the Cabernets that stain your tongue.
For one, red wine compounds like anthocyanins and tannins turn your mouth purple, whether or not the grape concentrate Mega Purple is present. And based on Avaline’s ingredient list from its website, the white and rosé (both $24) appear to be completely middleoftheroad industrial wines. Could it be more manipulated? Sure, and many massproduced wines are. But to put it on a “clean wine” pedestal would be a feat of wild imagination, and I have a hard time seeing how it “aims to set a new standard for the wine industry,” as its press release proclaims.
Let’s consider sulfites. Quick backgrounder on this controversial wine ingredient: Sulfur occurs naturally in wine grapes, but most winemakers add some extra sulfur dioxide in the winery, largely to prevent unwanted bacterial growth. Many, however, try to limit their sulfur additions, since too much of the stuff can strip a wine of its nuances. Some people also believe they’re harmful to consume, although that opinion draws hot debate within the wine industry.
Avaline says it keeps its sulfur levels to under 100 parts per million, which, frankly, is not a very low dose of sulfur at all. For comparison, Raw Wine, the leading natural wine fair, requires that all participating wines clock in at under 70 parts per million. If you’re looking for a lowsulfur wine, Avaline is not it.
Bentonite clay, pea protein and cream of tartar are also identified as ingredients in Avaline’s wines. All of these are used to spiff up the appearance of a wine — to ensure it doesn’t have bits of (unsightly, but harmless) sediment floating around in it, and to transform a wine from hazy to clear. The clay and pea protein are what’s known as fining agents: You add them to the wine, certain particles bind to them, and when you remove the fining agents, you also remove the particles.
Avaline ostensibly advertises its use of these particular fining agents because they’re vegan; some others, like egg whites and gelatin, are animal derived. (Either way, fining agents are not present in the wine by the time you’re drinking it.) OK, but naturalwine purists would consider any fining, vegan or not, a major intervention in the wine. This is not the way to earn one’s bona fides.
Finally, we come to yeast and yeast nutrients. If any natural winemaker has read this far, surely she’s laughing by now, because inoculating a wine with commercial yeast is pretty much the first disqualifier in naturalwine circles — at least the ones that are actually setting standards in the industry for lowadditive winemaking. It’s not that any of Avaline’s additives are unsafe for you to consume. It’s just that it’s peddling a false narrative where it’s a clean messiah in a world of sinful, dirty wines.
Of course, Avaline isn’t the only big brand to capitalize on the language of “clean,” “natural” and “organic” (brands like Minimum in Australia have done it before) without really abiding by its ethos, but it’s the first to have a name like Diaz, with such an enormous platform, attached to it. She gets to pick up the hard work of an actual movement, one that has strove to promote real transparency in winemaking, and use it to simply promote herself.
But, to use a nonvegan idiom, that’s not even my main beef with Avaline. The deeper problem is simple: “Clean wine” itself is a delusion. Ironically, the “cleanest”looking wines may actually be the ones that look and taste the dirtiest. Wines that are truly additivefree, which haven’t been filtered or inoculated or pasteurized or cryoextracted — some people call these “zerozero” wines — often look a little bit cloudy and taste a little bit funky. That crystalclear, perfectly pink rosé, I’m sorry to inform you, isn’t found in nature.
That’s the problem with the “clean” myth, for food as well as wine. What often gets marketed as clean, skinny, pure and lowimpact is so often a result of excessive manipulation (I’ll spare you my rant on hard seltzer) and, in fact, might not even be that healthy.
What ought to actually matter to us in a wine is how the grapes were farmed, including whether the people who worked the vineyard were treated equitably. And what determines the quality of a fine wine isn’t whether it was fined with pea protein as opposed to egg whites — it’s a vineyard’s climate and soil, and the unique weather patterns of any given vintage.
How does Avaline score on those standards? Apart from identifying the regions of origin — France’s Provence for the rosé, Spain’s Penedes for the white blend — the company did not disclose any information about who made the wines. When I asked for the names of the winemakers or the wineries, a spokesperson told me, “We have mutually agreed not to publicize our relationship.” So much for transparency.