A glass of three-penis wine, anyone? 14 July 2006

Wine has endured stranger additives than green pepper, says Tim James in his
current noseweek article

Throwing stuff into wine to make it more tasty or more interesting has a long history. The ancient Greeks and Romans added sea-water, or honey on occasion, or herbs and other ‘botanicals’ to produce a sort of vermouth. The Chinese, who seem traditionally to delight in ripping things off or out of animals for dubious purposes, still produce variations of snake-infused wine and ‘three-penis wine’.

The trio of unwilling contributors to the latter potion have customarily been the seal, the dog and the deer. As species they no doubt sighed with relief when Viagra came along, but too soon, as a number of conservative chaps out East insist on the good old ways.

For a short time in Singapore, however, a crucial component of Viagra became a popular wine additive before the dour health ministry clamped down. Sadly, there’s been an internet purge, and I can no longer find the splendid and hope-giving advertisement I came across half a decade back when researching an article on wine additives. It informed me that Viagra Tonic WIne, “which had ben abstracted from the treasure-house of traditional chinese medicine and pharmacology has properly met the man’s need for a overloaded wrok and high quality of pursuit in life, giving them more confidence and price”. The same producer offered other means to deal with a overloaded wrok, including their version of Three-Penis Wine, “brewed with pure grains, mixed with the precious Chinese medical materials as deerhorn blood, deer penis, bull penis, dog penis, lycium & ect. through scientific formula and advanced process”.

For some people, on the other hand, things go better with cocaine. For all I know it has the same effect as Three-Penis Wine in making ‘distinguished effects to spleen and kidney deficiency’ and can similarly ‘enhance the penis congestion’, and certainly in the latter half of the nineteenth century there was a pretty big buzz for Vin Mariani à la Coca du Perou: a mixture of Bordeaux wine and coca-leaf extract, developed by a Corsican chemist fascinated by coca, and enthusiastically endorsed by such diverse members of the establishment as Pope Leo XIII, Buffalo Bill, Queen Victoria and Louis Blériot – who was swigging it as he adventurously fluttered across the Channel.

Government crackdowns put a halt to this sort of adulteration, but it’s worth noting the legacy of Vin Mariani. An American copy was concocted in Atlanta in the 1880s, called French Wine Coca. But when prohibition pressures grew, John S Pemberton was forced to replace with distilled fruit oils the wine component in his “valuable brain tonic and … cure for all nervous afflictions”. Such was the disreputable birth of what became Coca-Cola, which apparently included coca until around 1903.

Exotic additives like all these make it seem a pretty mild thing to pulp some greenpepper into your sauvignon blanc, as did those two naughty KWV winemakers (and cleverer ones who weren’t caught). Nowadays, in what is, I trust, our largely law-abiding industry, I suspect the most often-used illegal additive is even more innocuous. In our cynical age, it’s less a question of miraculously turning water into wine than of putting water into wine – though not the salty water of old Greece.

The reason for dilution is not (well, not always) to stretch the wine, though this is a well-established fraud. Rather, the aim is to mitigate the soaring alcohol levels that accompany the ultra-ripe fruit flavours and richness that have become fashionable. Riper grapes mean more sugar, which means more alcohol. One possible result is ‘stuck fermentation', when the rising alcohol inhibits further conversion of sugar, and the yeasts just turn up their myriad little toes and leave the wine sweeter than most winelovers want it.

Another problem can be heavy, almost spiritously alcoholic wines. If you’re a clever winemaker the wine can be in balance despite the big alcohols, but many winelovers still find the wines hard to actually drink, especially when a refreshing accompaniment to food is called for – as opposed to appreciatively sipping one rich and powerful glassful. (The flavour of ultra-ripe grapes is another matter – some people clearly like pruney, raisiny notes.)

So adding water to lower the alcohol level, especially during fermentation, can be an attractive option – though not to ambitious winemakers who don’t like too much manipulation. But the process has already become legal (with some notional limits) in California, where they, being American, have developed some evasive euphemisms, like “breaking back” and “rehydration”.

Perhaps, perversely, dilution can have the same net effect as more convincing aphrodisiacs like deer penis. For alcohol’s effect on (male) lust is pretty equivocal, as the Porter in Macbeth pointed out: “Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.” But properly managed vineyards and wineries, and less devotion to over-ripe friut, are a preferable way to satisfaction at table and in bed than any amount of dilution – sorry, rehydrydration.

• This article first appeared in Noseweek, 'South Africa's unique investigative magazine'