Myth busting in the realm of wine
Good news: Your wine is safe to drink.
This isn’t obvious to everyone. If you spend enough time reading about wine on the Internet, you’ll encounter all kinds of needless concerns: that Two Buck Chuck is chockfull of spiders and insects (not a thing); that Menage a Trois contains dangerously high arsenic levels (definitely not a thing).
Wine is vulnerable to these types of fear-mongering headlines in part because, unlike most other federally regulated comestibles, it doesn’t have to list ingredients on its label. (With the exception, of course, of sulfites — another tragically misunderstood target of rabble rousing.) All the label gives you is that ominous government warning against operating machinery. Who knows what’s in that bottle — could be anything!
In theory, the only components of wine should be 1) grapes and 2) the yeast that converts those grapes’ sugar into alcohol. All wines contain a few more elements than that, though.
Ridge Vineyards, which has — somewhat cheekily — taken to listing ingredients on its labels in recent years, enumerates, in addition to “hand harvested, sustainably grown grapes” and “indigenous yeasts,” “naturally occurring malolactic bacteria; calcium carbonate; minimum effective SO2.” Extra credit for Ridge for the minimalist vibe — but it had a ton of other tools at its disposal.
According to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, there are 62 chemical materials that can legally be added to a wine, none of which, again, needs to be accounted for on the label.
This is where the hysteria comes in. They’re pumping my wine full of 62 chemicals?!
Some of these materials, although they may bust the just-grapes-and-yeast myth, nevertheless sound relatively harmless. That calcium carbonate on the Ridge label? Also known as Tums. Egg whites (a fining agent)? Yum, make me an omelet. Potassium bitartrate (a wine stabilizer)? That’s the same cream of tartar you’ve got in your spice drawer. Activated charcoal (to correct a wine’s color)? I just started taking that as a vitamin supplement.
On the other hand, some of the permissible materials can freak people out. Copper (to get rid of mercaptans, which can make the wine smell like burnt rubber). Oak chips (to approximate the flavor that would be imparted by an oak barrel). Fish collagen (for clarification).
And then there’s the famous MegaPurple and its off-brand equivalents, that goopy syrup of grape concentrate used to doctor a wine into something boozier, darker and sweeter than the vineyard could have produced. Because it’s derived from grapes, concentrate is used to bypass the illegal (in California) practice of chaptalization, adding sugar to grape juice pre-fermentation to increase its potential alcohol.
Industrially processed foods use some of the same materials on the trade bureau’s go-list. Citric acid (used to alter a wine’s pH), for example, is found in most caramel candies and frozen fish. This leads a lot of people to equate their distaste for processed food with a distaste for processed wine. Trans fats, factory farming, hydrogenated oil — it’s gonna kill me, right?
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Processed wine is not analogous to processed food. None of these chemical additions — not the copper, not the oak chips, not even Velcorin, a microbe killer so powerful that a licensed technician has to come in and apply it at the winery — makes the wine the least bit unsafe for you to drink by the time you’re popping a cork. Your glass contains no insects, and not even trace amounts of fish collagen. If there’s anything harmful in there, it’s ... oh, I don’t know, maybe alcohol. OK? OK.
But of course, as a purchaser of a bottle of wine, you are entitled to interests beyond mere physical safety.
I’m sympathetic to — though I can’t say I feel it myself — the sense that wineries employing all these newfangled chemicals to doctor nature’s bounty are somehow cheating, taking shortcuts and trying to pass it off as the real thing. Maybe it feels dishonest, like you’re not getting the product as advertised.
Just keep in mind that there’s a difference between wineries that apply MegaPurple and oak chips and tannin powder as a matter of protocol — whether to cut costs or to produce a flavor profile that nature couldn’t — and those that use additives judiciously, to fix a problem. Do you want your Chardonnay to look like murky bathwater? If not, you should resign yourself to the fact that the wine will get filtered. Do you love when your Syrah smells like burnt rubber? No? Well, then a winemaker might have to add a little copper sulfate to get rid of that.
One is cosmetic plastic surgery; the other is plastic surgery after a third-degree burn.
Whether any wine tastes good is for you to decide. Some wine tasters swear they can taste MegaPurple, and that they can tell when tannin or acid adjustments were made. Most wine drinkers can’t, and they may enjoy heavily manipulated wines, especially if they come cheap, as they often do. I’m willing to bet the average American wine drinker would like them a lot more than a wine made without additives that has been spoiled by brettanomyces or lactobacillus.
As a wine consumer personally, I want to invest in wines that convey a sense of the place where they came from: that taste just so because they came from just here. I don’t actively
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Processed wine is not analogous to processed food.
want my wines to be juiced up with a million chemical additives; who would? But I’m aware that I, like all passionate wine drinkers, am susceptible to the impossible bucolic myth — that when I buy a bottle of Pinot Noir with beautiful cursive lettering on its label and a back-label description of the windy, cool-climate Sonoma Coast vineyard where the grapes grew, I’m reducing it into a story that somehow promotes the kind of wine drinker I want to be. Even subconsciously, I imagine the craggy, steep vineyard hovering above the Pacific Ocean, and some flannel-donning farmers shepherding the grapes from vineyard to vat, standing back, reverently, as the wine makes itself.
That tableau does not exist for every wine with cursive lettering on its label. This is commercial manufacturing. The myth can unravel quickly when you start asking questions: Who picked the grapes? What are those people’s working conditions? Was the vineyard stripped bare all year with pesticides and RoundUp?
If you’re the kind of person who wants to use her purchasing power for good rather than evil, stop focusing on tannin powder and tartaric acid.
The better question to ask: whether you’re supporting a company that practices equity and respect for the people and the land that create its products.