As a Europhile, euro-enthusiast republican living on a Eurosceptic island devoted to its monarchy and its national currency, there are a number of revolutions which I accept may never come to pass. There is one, though, I still have high hopes of. That revolution would be a listing of all wine additives on labels or packaging.
Quite why winemakers have got away so lightly when food producers and soft-drink chemists have to label every ingredient is puzzling. If an Italian adds citric acid to the tomatoes he is canning, it must be listed on the label. If an Italian winemaker adds ascorbic acid to his wine, no one need know. This is anomalous. Eurosceptics might point out that it underlines the power of the wine lobby in Brussels. Indeed; but few other dispensations do better.
It leads to two sorts of myth about wine. The first (from those liable to over-indulgence) is that wine is ‘totally natural’; the second (from those liable to under-indulgence) is that wine is ‘packed with additives’. Some wines may indeed contain no additives (though personally I’d steer clear of any wine claiming to be sulphur-free) while some have had plenty of helping chemical hands along the way. There are 236 potential additives listed on the Australian Wine Research Institute website. I’d love to know which ones have been used in the bottle of wine I’m about to drink.
No doubt wine producers would resist the idea, claiming that providing such information would ‘scare the public needlessly’. This is surely to overestimate the public’s fear threshold. Millions manage to ignore SMOKING KILLS on their packs of coffin nails every day; and if the public was truly scared of additives, the entire carbonated soft drink market would collapse overnight. The punctilious labelling of wine additives would merely advance knowledge and understanding in an area where myth has overstayed its welcome. If it also discouraged the needless addition of additives to wine, so much the better. I don’t hold ‘naturalness’ in wine to be an absolute ideal, but I passionately believe in it as a qualified ideal.
Perhaps I should confess at this point that I am an enthusiastic reader of food-ingredient lists. Not because of any latent paranoia about the subject, but because I love tasting – everything. There are, for example, dozens of oat-based breakfast cereals (usually called ‘muesli’ and ‘crunchy’ or 'granola' on the UK market, depending on style). European food-labelling regulations provide a sugar total in grams per 100g; the lowest in these prepared cereals is usually around 18g, but they can go as high as 40g+. It’s fun to taste the increments, though I find anything over 30g hard going. Another breakfast taste comparison: Shredded Wheat versus Weetabix. Weetabix has almost five times as much sugar as Shredded Wheat (4.4g compared to 0.9g) though since the amounts are small you might not immediately guess it. But the real key to the taste difference between the two is Weetabix’s malted barley extract, even though it is less than five per cent of the total. If you want to understand malty flavours (as whisky tasters might), compare Weetabix with Shredded Wheat. Bravo those labels.
Wine example? Hundreds, but here’s just one. I tasted Laurent Miquel’s 2006 Verité Viognier Vins de Pays d’Oc last week. It’s a serious, £12 effort -- but I didn’t like it. Far too acid, especially for Viognier; nothing like glycerous or rich enough. Somehow that acidity seemed to constrain the relatively delicate orange perfumes of the wine. I feel I have the right to know if that acid was added or not. It matters. If it was added, that tells me the winemaker desired this profile. If it wasn’t, it suggests that either the site isn’t suitable for Viognier or that picking Viognier early to preserve acidity is a bad idea.
There are other areas in which full additive labelling would be immensely helpful to curious, assiduous wine tasters. Wines from the same grape variety and the same region made with added, selected yeasts, for example, against those made with wild yeasts; or wines made with added tannins against those whose tannins have come from grape skins and wood alone. Wines made with oak chips versus those made with oak staves. Wines in which enzymes have been used against those where they haven’t.
While we’re at it, I’d also like to see subtractions (of water, of alcohol) labelled as well as additives in those cases where the subtractions are done by physical rather than chemical means, though I recognise that producers might argue there is not the same moral force requiring them to label something which is absent as something which is present. But if you’re going to have a revolution, you might as well do the thing properly.