The wine industry's little secret

An interesting little article I found on the net
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/weekendlife/story.html?id=aef16415-934d-486e-964b-288d6e424a6d&p=1

BILL ZACHARKIW
Freelance


Saturday, September 08, 2007


Barry Bonds is the new "home-run king" of baseball. However, rather than immediately raising Bonds to iconic status, the media have focused on his use of steroids and how his accomplishment should be recognized in the context of modern, professional sport. In short, was Barry cheating and if so, how do we deal with it?

It's a fair question.

I only wish the mainstream wine media would do the same.

We are at somewhat of a crossroads in the wine industry.

Today's winemakers have access to such an impressive array of technologies, analytical tools and ingredients that it begs a question: When is a wine no longer a wine but rather an industrial beverage, comparable to Snapple, Gatorade and Michelob?

And much like the debate over steroids and performance-enhancing drugs, purists are pitted against modernists, with one side claiming that the way many wines are being made today is an affront to tradition, creating unfair advantage and destroying diversity.

The other side asks what is more important: the wine in the glass or how it was made?

How should wine be made?

To put this into context, let's talk winemaking. On one extreme we have the "natural" wines. These wines are the closest to how many of us imagine a wine is made, and the image that the industry cultivates. Its essence is simple: Grapes are crushed, the juice ferments, is separated from the skins, left to age a bit, then put in bottles as wine. These wines, for better or worse, are a reflection of where the grapes were grown and the year the wine was made.

They are also rare.

On the other end of the spectrum are the "industrial" wines. The people making many of these wines start with a certain taste profile in mind, and with the aid of gas chromatography and other analytical tools the grapes are tweaked into wine with the help of colourants, sugar, acids, enzymes, water, aromatic yeasts and other flavour enhancers.

These wines have little to do with the name of the grapes on the bottle, or when and where they were grown. Rather, they are engineered to taste a certain way and are an expression of the winemaker rather than nature.

These are the inexpensive wines that fill up the supermarket shelves and many of the branded wines at the low end of the price spectrum. To be fair, while they often taste the same, they are much better than they once were. Boring is better than bad.

Image versus reality

If given a choice between the two extremes, I hazard that most wine lovers would rather their wine be made by the more natural method. However, the reality is that the majority of winemaking takes place in a gray area somewhere in between the two.

Pretty well all wines have things added to them. In cooler growing areas, such as in France, sugar is often added to the juice to make up for a lack of ripeness, a process referred to as chapitalisation. In hotter climates, winemakers often add tartaric acid, powdered tannin or even water to make up for over-ripe grapes. These additives are so commonly used that they are a part of the winemaking traditions of certain regions, and are even regulated as to when and how much of these additives may be used.

So what are people fussing about?

While the purists regard even the above interventions as too much, a number of other manipulations are much more debatable. Techniques like reverse osmosis and spinning cones are used to either remove alcohol or concentrate the juice. Micro-oxidation, a technique whereby small amounts of oxygen is injected into the wine, softens up the tannin, effectively mimicking what would normally happen if a bottle of wine were aged, doing in hours what would take years in a cellar.

Even more controversial are those additives that are used to flavour wine. These include wood chips, which are used to make your wine taste of oak though at a fraction of the cost of real barrels, certain industrial yeasts that are used to boost aromatics, and colourants and enzymes like Mega Purple, which add not only colour, but also alter the flavour and texture of the wine.

This is not a question of New World versus Old World, and their use is not restricted to any particular price range. Those who support the use of these technologies believe they are simply tools that give the winemaker the ability to craft their wines, to fine-tune them as it were, ultimately making a better wine.

The other side sees them as producing fake flavours, fake aromas, fake textures, in short, fake wine. Every extra manipulation peels away another distinctive quality that makes a wine unique.

The pandering problem

What I see as the big problem is perhaps best exemplified by a service that a company called Enologix offers to its winemaking clientele. Enologix uses spectrometres and chromatographs to separate and measure particular chemical compounds in a vintner's juice. The resulting index, the ratio of phenols, terpenes and other chemicals, are then compared to a "benchmark" wine, which is in effect what they believe is the perfect wine. And where does this perfect wine come from? Enologix has done a similar analysis of a number of wines that have received high scores from influential members of the American media, and have simply averaged out the values.

The premise is simple: "The score" is everything, and by modelling one's wine after those that have received high scores, one will receive a similar benediction, and thus sales.

So as winemakers gain more and more control over how a wine will eventually taste, there is greater temptation to follow recipes like those offered by companies like Enologix to assuage a same small coterie of tastes. The result is that wines begin to taste the same and regional variations diminish.

And this is what scares me.

Over the last couple of years, I have found it increasingly difficult to "place" many wines. They are good, they drink well, but they could almost come from anywhere. One of the benefits of living where we do is that we have access to a selection of wines from the four corners of the wine world. It would be a shame if such a rich diversity were lost.

These technologies have enabled winemakers to make good, cheap wine from often substandard grapes, and the world needs that.

But the question must be asked: In the hand of the skilled winemaker, are these manipulations really necessary? Where should the line be drawn?

The French have made moves to regulate the use of wood chips, for example, as have some other countries. It is a start, but more needs to be done. The real enemy is perhaps not the technology itself, but those winemakers who are simply not good grape growers or skilled enough wine makers, and are thus forced to use extreme measures to finish their wines.

But if you want to know what went into making your wine, you are out of luck. The vast majority of wineries simply don't like to talk about it. The industry wants you to believe that wonderful bucolic image it has so deftly created, and it fears that it will be shattered by disclosing how some wine is actually made.

Unfortunately, the mainstream wine media also do little to trumpet authenticity and diversity. They seem unwilling to get involved in a debate that is already happening among winemakers, on the wine blogs, and between many wine lovers.

I'll try to do differently here in my small corner of the world of wine journalism, and every now and then dig a little deeper into issues like this.

You might have noticed that many of my reviews use the words classic, traditional or unique.

For me, simply being good is no longer good enough.

But in the end it will be you who decides what it is you want to drink, whether Barry Bonds was cheating, and if it really matters.

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007