Some surprising additives are regularly used to doctor wines.

SOON AFTER THE DAWN of human civilization some bright spark noticed things tasted better when mixed with certain locally available substances. It wouldn't have taken long for humans to notice that sprinkling their food with salt, pepper, herbs, spices and wood smoke not only improved its flavour and masked bad odours, but also extended the useful life of their victuals.

As liquid food, wine has also been doctored (sorry) for as long as it's been made. A shard of 7,000-year-old Persian pottery at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum from an ancient wine jug shows pine resin residues, suggesting ancient producers knew that resinated wine had both better flavour and a longer shelf life than untreated versions.

The rich wines made under the hot Mediterranean sun were much nicer with a splash of fresh - or sea - water, a particular favourite in Classical Greece.

The Romans developed an unfortunate taste for wines sweetened with lead.

Centuries of experimentation gave humanity countless wines "improved" with all kinds of additives. Some additions to grapes are accepted without a second thought. Oak, which stabilizes a wine's colour and imparts sweet, spicy and toasty character, is an obvious example. Originally achieved through the use of 220 litre barrels made from charred oak staves, oakiness can now be achieved with tea-bag-like sacks of oak chips or with liquid oak extract.

Less obvious but now universal manipulations include chapitalisation (adding sugar to fermenting must so as to boost alcohol content), acidification with substances like tartaric acid to brighten and firm up flabby wines and the use of sulphur-bearing compounds to prevent infection, stop fermentation, retard oxidation and even improve flavour in wines.

Scott Laboratories, one of many firms manufacturing wine additives, boasts a vast inventory of additives including cultured yeast strains, yeast promoters and nutrients, malo-lactic bacterial cultures, microbial control agents, enological enzymes, enological tannins and intriguingly named "general tools".

Larry Paterson is an elfin character with long experience in Niagara's vineyards and wine cellars. Know as the "Little Fat Wino" (his excellent Web site is www.littlefatwino.com), he delights in such mischief as boasting that with a few special little bottles he can turn an undrinkable Canuck cab into beautiful wine in 20 minutes.

To prove his point, Larry brought his chemistry set to a recent meeting of the Wine Writer's Circle of Canada. Specifically, he presented a simple tart seyval blanc and samples of the same wine treated with various ameliorators.

The first product we assessed was "Opti-White", a "new natural yeast derivative for use in white winemaking" from Lallemand Labs. According to the company Web site, it's "rich in polysaccharides and high in antioxidants (that) allow the winemaker to lower the SO2 dosage. Opti-White may also be added after alcohol fermentation to simulate extended aging on lees."

The substance itself is a bone-coloured powder with aromas of light soy and shortbread. When added to the juice at the onset of fermentation, Opti-White "...increases mouthfeel, avoids browning and protects fresh aromas during aging."

In Larry's seyval, Opti-White worked like a charm. It brightened the colour, creamed out the mouthfeel, tamed the acidity and added a pungent mineral nuance to the wine.

Next we tried a little Galalool, a colourless "flavouring" tannin made from "oak waste," for white wines. This little gem gave the neutral seyval an intense noise of new plank with hints of vanilla, sweet spice and toasted coffee bean. It also contributed a creamy feel and rich persistence.

Tannin Plus was a thrilling oak-waste product. The brown powder looked and smelled like finely ground nutmeg, cinnamon and cocoa. The substance adds 16 times the amount of vanillin to wine that would come from a year in a new French oak barrique! In Larry's seyval, Tannin Plus created a postitive gold colour and beautiful new wood aromas with sweet vanillin and a hint of toasty coffee bean aromas and velvety texture.

In the end, Larry's additive tasting left us slack-jawed. He seemed surprised at our ignorance (and, from some quarters, indignation) at the adulteration of wines, noting that the success of Australian shiraz has been largely the result of generous dollops of Tannin Plus. He can name successful Niagara wineries that have done it the same way.

Now I'm not generally a pro-regulation kind of guy, but suddenly, I wonder if we can get content labels slapped on wine. I like to know what I'm drinking, even if it's friendly stuff like Opti-White and Tannin Plus.

www.littlefatwino.com