Do you still trust grape flavour when coffee and chocolates abound in wine?

The current (marketing) madness for wines that taste anything but like the grapes they are supposed to come from, should galvanise any cynic. Golly, where do those flavours come from?

A recent eye-catching article stirs up more questions when it reported that the world’s leading flavour and fragrance company had created a new flavour for a beer, which turned out to be most successful in the market. Isn’t beer suppose to taste, well, natural - like from the gods’ own ingredients it’s brewed from? If beer, why not wine?

The article in question is a fine piece of researched writing in The New Yorker about an industry that purposely operates in secrecy, but makes enormous profits, having a finger in seemingly every pie that gets eaten or pint that gets drunk by the globe’s consumers. Subtly, but somewhat scarily titled ‘The Taste Makers’, the article traces and exposes (some of) the dealings of Givaudan, the Swiss-based giant that creates and manufactures ‘taste and smell solutions’.

Givaudan’s website says it all: “Its rich heritage dates back to 1796, making it the first company to establish itself as a creator of tastes and scents. In 2008, the company achieved sales of CHF 4,087 million [more than R30 billion], with a work force of 8772 employees and subsidiaries in 46 countries.”

Throughout the magazine article one is made aware of the hush-hush business (patents are not registered and clients remain mostly anonymous). About 90% of processed food is flavoured through these ‘taste and smell solutions’. Authorities officially monitoring health, etc seem to stay at a distance, apparently being appeased by these powerful institutions that their molecular flavour constructs are derived from ‘nature’. So, despite the manipulations in their laboratory factories, you’ll read the fine print on the back label recording that mysterious ‘natural flavourant’ - which may very well be the secret ingredient that makes your supermarket crème caramel taste so deliciously vanilla-ish. (This flavour, by the way, had been synthesized way back in 1874. These days, the article says, it can be extracted from cow dung.)

Which brings one to the wine issue - those tasting of chocolates and coffee, or strawberries or canned peas or even cat’s pee. All these aromatics are easily simulated in the manufacturing laboratories of big companies like Givaudan’s and come in highly concentrated solutions. (No need for soaking real fruit in your tank.) If it is used in just about any other consumer product, why not wine?

Of course, the addition of flavourant additives to wine are illegal in South Africa and local winemakers stick to the law. However.

Before evil suspicions take hold and are quickly shot down in the Cape cellars everywhere, one must consider that, sometimes, serious conversations do take place about the ‘outside’ elements that are used in the winemaking process, from wine to bottle. Taken for granted, those compounds, chemicals, whatever, may not be so far removed from the scientifically-pure ‘solutions’ that the very successful flavour/taste/aroma companies produce and are standing by to provide.

* Of course, the cynicism evoked by thoughts of these easy-obtainable flavours, ultimately spreads to the very issue of wine tasting (and evaluation) itself. Here’s a direct quote from the article: “And yet controlled experiments show that, no matter what a person’s professional vocabulary or expertise, aromas remain a blur: the average person, with minimum training, can perceive about three or four distinct components in a given aroma; professional flavorists (sic) ... can do no better.”

** Givaudan South Africa (Pty) Ltd has two offices: ‘Fragrances creation/application & sales’ in Sandton, and ‘Flavours creation/application, sales & production’ in Tulisa Park, Johannesburg.