Secret Ingredient
JOHN SZABO TAKES NOTES.
I HATE TO KILL THE ROMANCE OF WINE. AFTER ALL, IT IS A beautiful, natural product made simply from fermented grapes, handcrafted by some multigenerational, family-run concern. I can just see the deep, humid, candlelit cellar at a constant and perfect 11oC, with Giuseppe or Jean-Francois with his wine thief pulling a taste of brilliant red liquid from one of a row of ancient casks. "A beautiful vintage," he declares, as he releases a few precious drops for the group of dedicated wine enthusiasts who have travelled halfway around the world to experience this very moment. "A perfect expression of the vineyard and reflection of the conditions of the growing season," he continues. That is what wine is all about, right?
Get real -- this isn't the 18th century. Of course there are still many wines made around the world made with minimal intervention, but more and more are manipulated to seduce you. Some might say even cheat you. And I am not even talking about illegal additives. What is being added to your wine are perfectly legal food-grade products that need not be declared on the label.
Not that adding foreign substances to wine is anything new. Jean-Antoine Chaptal figured out back in the early 19th century that adding sugar to grape juice could boost alcohol levels and make a wine taste smoother, more full-bodied and rounded -- a huge advantage for making more commercially appealing wine. Another ethically questionable practice of the day was blending wines to achieve a style: a little dollop of wine from the Rhone or even Algeria in your Burgundy or Bordeaux would add colour, alcohol, body and riper flavours. Today, winemakers can make up for nature's shortcomings and inconsistencies more conveniently via high-tech equipment and various additives.
LARRY PATERSON, A TRAINED AMATEUR WINEMAKER BELIEVES, "THE LAST honest wine ever made came from vines growing up a tree. Grapes don't grow in fields." True enough, I thought, which raises the ethical consideration of how far is too far when it comes to forcing nature or adding things to wine. If it makes the wine better, more commercially saleable, should these practices be banned altogether? What is honest wine?
You can argue that adding acid to wine, which is more or less standard practice in many warm growing regions of the world, such as Chile, South Africa and Australia, is unnatural. But without it, wines would be unstable and have a much shorter shelf life. Unnatural, too, is the the common practice of taking specially selected, freeze-dried yeasts from the other side of the world to ferment wine, or certainly adding artificial flavouring to increase flavour and aroma intensity. Hell, oak adds flavour to wine, so what makes this foreign additive more acceptable if it comes from a barrel as opposed to oak chips or a test tube of liquid oak flavouring?
Paterson, never one to shy away from controversy, organized a tasting for a group of Toronto-based sommeliers to demonstrate the dramatic changes caused by various additives. He adjusted control samples with things like Tanin Galalcool, a finishing, Tanin Plus, a flavouring tannin, AR 2000, an aroma-enhancing enzyme, and OptiWhite, a nutrient that protects against oxidation and that adds body and a yeasty, leesy character to wine. Again, all perfectly legal, off-the-shelf stuff.
The results were nothing short of amazing. We tasted eight originally identical samples of dry Ontario Vidal, each subjected to a different treatment. In a blind tasting I would not have guessed that the eight samples were all the same save for the additives, not, even more alarmingly, would I have necessarily picked out that these were manipulated wines.
The sample with OptiWhite was more yeasty, with a sur lie character, less fruity than the control sample and seemed to have lower acidity and a more rounded mouthfeel. The sample with the aroma-enhancing AR 2000 was indeed more aromatic, with an almost late-harvest-like intensity, though it showed advanced oxidation. The samples with added finishing and flavouring tannins had more body and a distinctive astringent character -- I would almost certainly guessed that these wines had been aged in wood, which of course they weren't. Aromatically, too, they had pronounced wood spice and toasty caramel notes that smelled, not surprisingly, like the little jar of Tanin Plus that Paterson passed around for us to smell. My favourite of the lot was sample No. 4, one with both AR 2000 and OptiWhite added. It was the most balanced, complex and pleasant version. Scary stuff.
With reds, Paterson toyed around with the same additives to much the same effect, altering the tannic structure and aromatic intensity of identical base samples. The most eye-opening experiment was the effect of a couple of drops of chocolate extract in a Cabernet-Merlot. It reduced the herbal-green flavours and introduced an attractive chocolatey nuance that had undeniable appeal. hmm, I've certainly come across that profile before...
At the end of the tasting, no general ethical conclusions were drawn. It is clear that winemakers can dramatically change a wine's profile through some clever chemistry and technological aids, but it is not always easy to tell which wines have been manipulated. It may be unavoidable, even desirable that winemakers attempt to improve on nature, just as medical science and pharmaceutical companies have been doing for years. I'll let you decide what honest wine means to you. One thing we should all demand, however, is mandatory labelling of all additives in wine, just as food manufacturers are required to do. At least then we can make informed decisions about what we drink.
NEW ADDITITIVES GIVE WINEMAKERS THE POWER TO IMPROVE ON NATURE.