Additives in wine -- an issue that will only get hotter along with the planet. While additives are fairly strictly regulated in most countries, some countries fiddle with your wine more than others. Shining example: our very own US of A. Here, it seems, anything goes.
How would I know this? I checked out the OIV's comparative checklist of permitted additives. I quote Jancis Robinson today:
...there's a handy comparative table put together by the OIV (Organisation
Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin, or International Organisation of
Vine and Wine), and unlike many of these resources, it is pretty up to
date (Jan 2007).
Go to this link for the table, all 14 pages of it. The OIV home page is here.
Do your own compare-and-contrast, nation by nation. It isn't very heartening.
Soy flour! who knew?
What's perplexing about all this is that there's no reason why wine shouldn't be as pure as pure can be; sure there has to be some element of clarifying, as used to be done with egg whites, but so many of the other factors should have been taken care of in the vineyard. And oak chips or oak powder simply cannot to for a wine what time resting quietly in a barrel will do; those chips are a sad manifesttaion of the american desire to smell toasty oak in a wine's bouquet. When you think about what the components are of a bottle of wine -- about 85 to 87 percent water, about 12 to 14 percent alcohol (well, more today, of course), and maybe 1 or 2 percent complex chemical compounds that make the wine into wine, you have to wonder why anything else should be there.
Posted by: Fredric Koeppel | April 27, 2007 at 11:11 AM
I know. Why do we have to muck everything up? We do analogous things to our food, which is why most food in this country tastes so bland, if not outright awful. And we marvel at how good everything tastes in (southern) Europe. The trade-off in our Faustian bargain with standardization.
Posted by: Terry Hughes | April 27, 2007 at 11:16 AM