In vino veritas?

In this age of highly processed food and drink, wine lovers like to think of the noblest of beverages as also among the most natural. The possibility of ‘improving’ wines with the aid of additives and high-tech equipment, is increasingly there, however. Ingrid Motteux considers some of the possibilities, and wonders about their ultimate contribution to our pleasure.

Ben Johnson might have argued, following his fall from grace, that in taking steroids he was merely enhancing his performance. Surely, a sensational and extraordinary feat of athletics is what the spectator-millions desire? Why are we so precious about wine being improved by various additions, extractions and modifications, when it may mean the end result is better to drink than the original, undoctored version? Is it because we regard it is as mysterious and ‘living’ – the most supremely natural and divine of all beverages? Perhaps we don’t really mind when it comes to the commercial-style high-volume stuff, but would feel terribly deceived if we discovered our comfortably cellared, hand-crafted, highly exclusive wines had in fact been corrupted. Just a smidgen of glycerol to plump them up, or a few grams of colouring anthocyanin for cosmetic reasons in a not-so-ripe vintage – where’s the harm in that?

There is extensive denial that this sort of skullduggery exists. Worldwide, details of some of the fairly commonly employed illegal, grey area, and even accepted wine manipulations, are difficult to come by. One of the few winemakers I spoke to who was prepared to discuss the issue, gaily recalled adding berry fruit to vats in Burgundy (with which he didn’t persist, as it was more costly than coaxing flavours from the vineyard) and making red wine from white in the new world. There are many open secrets that are in nobody’s interests to disclose (well, nobody’s except the consumer, perhaps). Any staunch non-interventionist pointing a finger or two would be branded an industry-harming troublemaker. Besides, such malpractice would be very difficult to prove.

A paper delivered at a recent (Australian) congress, identifying challenges for the wine analyst in detecting illegal manipulations, proves that the practice takes place on a significant scale. Identifying mineral acids in wine was at the top of the list. Sulphuric acid is far cheaper to use for acidity adjustment than the natural fruit acids permitted in warm climates. In price-point selling, cost-cutting is crucial.

Sniffing out the less harmful, though still illegal, additives – tannin-based aromatic and colouring compounds, glycerol, pyrazines, essences of vanilla, oak and fruits – remains a challenge. These may be outlawed, but how enforceable are the regulations? Naturally occurring glycerol levels vary with climate, grape variety and type of yeast used, so added glycerol is difficult to identify without elaborate equipment, which can detect added (industrial) glycerol, as it contains certain by-products, presence of which is proof of adulteration. Even though it may be obvious in South Africa that strongly herbaceous characters in sauvignon blanc are highly implausible in hot climate wines, accusations of added pyrazines would be hard to verify.

What do we regard as manipulation? Just because the Burgundians have been throwing cane sugar into their musts for centuries, does it make the practice acceptable? At least the tartaric and ascorbic acid used in the warmer parts of the world is a natural component of the grape. Germicidal and antioxidant, sulphur dioxide is another well-accepted, traditional additive. Technology exists to circumvent its use, but this would add unrealistic costs to the wine. Sound grapes require far lower levels of sulphur than deficient ones, but it is more convenient for a inept vigneron to add quantities of this ‘traditional’ substance than it would be to pay closer attention to shoddy viticultural practices. In some areas of France it has almost become a legitimate character of the wine, though this is changing. Rather, it is not the use of the less offensive additives and manipulations per se, but how judiciously they are applied, that is the consideration.

High-tech machines

Beyond the category of additives, there is a growing battery of accepted, new interventions in the winemaker’s arsenal, that may not deserve the dirty word adulteration: they involve using high-tech equipment to manage specific areas of the winemaking process.

Cultivating grapes in hot climates often means that genuine (‘phenolic’) maturity of the grape is only reached when the levels of sugar (and therefore potential alcohol) are excessively high. Putting the wine through a reverse osmosis machine or, alternatively, a spinning cone, means that this excess alcohol can be removed, supposedly resulting in a better balanced wine. The same machine can be used in wetter regions to extract water from the grape must during a rainy harvest. Other such ‘must concentration’ techniques include bleeding, freezing and vacuum distillation, (which has been superceded by the preferable and less expensive reverse osmosis technique). Experiments in South Africa to concentrate grape must with reverse osmosis were conducted in 2002. Results were favourable, and regulations are to be published by the Department of Agriculture allowing its use in time for the 2003 harvest (though not yet for wines destined for the European Union).

The versatile reverse osmosis machine has also found widespread use as a means of removing volatile acidity (VA) from finished wine. Since the signing of the SA/EU Trade Agreement in January 2002, wines that have had excess VA removed may be exported to Europe. A cheaper, but less refined, filtration system is also used for this purpose in South Africa. Questioned about how the process affects the wine in terms of aroma, flavour and longevity, representatives of local companies providing this service claim that various in-house trials and studies have been done in the United States which demonstrate no significant differences.

On the other hand, Roger Boulton, a professor at the University of California, Davis, has been quoted as pointing out: ‘There are no independent published reports of the sensory effects of this treatment compared to a control, only proprietary claims and selective testimonials. There is no published example of a side-by-side comparison across several wines.’ If the example in Grape 16’s tasting of manipulated wines, of a wine before and after undergoing the reverse osmosis process, is representative of how a wine is organoleptically changed (much for the worse in this case), closer investigation in this regard is crucial.

Another fairly new and popular manipulation is micro-oxygenation, or microbullage. The technique allows for very slow addition of small amounts of oxygen to red wine in tanks, simulating the controlled oxidation of barrel maturation. It is supposed to remove green characteristics, improve structure, stabilise colour and result in a more supple and rounded wine. Again, Professor Boulton’s misgivings have been quoted: ‘There is little indication that the proponents of this treatment have developed a strong understanding of the changes occurring, and there are both short-term and longer-term results that cannot be predicted.’ He also calls the term micro-oxygenation a misnomer, because in terms of oxygen consumed and acetaldehydes produced, this is far more than wines ever see during time in barrel, even with frequent racking.

Advocates of this technique include well-respected winemakers, here and abroad, who claim that using micro-oxygenation in conjunction with oak chips and staves produces a satisfactorily ‘wooded’ wine at much lower cost than could have been achieved with barrels. It is possible that these short-cuts will show with time. An award-winner might become hollow and insubstantial a year or two later. But does this matter?

A maverick local winemaker-turned-consultant justified it this way to me: ‘If you’re producing roses for a wedding, they must be perfectly open on the day, which mostly requires manipulation at the expense of longevity. The same with most wine. It must be enjoyable on the day of purchase, and if that means employing certain illegal but harmless techniques, then so be it.’

The international wine industry might have a lot to lose by confessing that, although less interfered with than most other foodstuffs, wine may not be as true as we would like to believe. There might be more lost in the long term by denying the problem, as rogues continue to hoodwink the wine-drinking public. Many people may well relish the guava essence in their cheap chenin; a pinch of pyrazine might pep up my glass of chilled hot-climate sauvignon blanc, and a dash of glycerol and blackcurrant may benefit my bottle of trophy-winning red.

But I don’t like being duped. And honest winemakers may fail to garner awards because they are not prepared to use a bit of legal, semi-legal or frankly illegal help to produce seductive, panel-pleasing wines. If one imagines that experienced judges would always manage to detect such ‘fine-tuning’, think again about some questionable (and even the less-questionable) gold medal successes. Are we really improving our wines with all this tampering? Is it the best way of improving quality? Is it perhaps just plain cheating?