WineLife365

I’ve been wondering why a large number of wines made both inside and outside of the United States have tasted so “manufactured”.  So far in 2009, I’ve tried a ton of wines that tasted brutally unnatural or fake to me.  If you take a look at some of my wine reviews, you’ll see that I’ve used the term “lab rat tasting” on many occasions, simply because those particular wines tasted strangely engineered, as though they came from a lab instead of off of a vine. I’ve been so fed up by the alarming number of these phony tasting wines that I wanted to “get to the bottom of the barrel” to find out what is making so many of them taste so dreadful.  After doing a little research, it appears that the source of my frustration points to the overuse, or down-right “heavy-handed” use of wine additives.

 
Many of us tend to have this idyllic and romantic notion in our mind that the art of making fine wine is all Mother Nature’s doing.  We envision the beautiful rolling slopes of vines where the grapes are fully ripened and then carefully hand-selected and made into a fine wine.  However, wineries and their winemakers are a lot more scientifically predisposed than you might think.  Today’s talented winemakers are highly educated and skilled employees armed with an endless supply of possible additives and state of the art lab equipment that assist them with achieving a desired flavor, complexity, and consistency.  However, there are currently no laws in place that force wineries to list their ingredients on their labels the same way that other beverages are expected to do.
I was amazed by the long list of additives that winemakers around the globe are legally permitted to use without having to list them on their labels.

 
See for yourself:  Wine Additives List

  
*Please note that this list of wine additives is not all-inclusive and does not reflect what each country or winery may or may not use in their wine-making process. 

That’s a lot of additives to swallow (pun intended!).  But believe it or not, its really only scratching the surface.  Given the laundry list of additives, it makes you wonder what it is you’re really drinking.  And there are a lot of wineries around the world that would prefer to keep this kind of information a secret and not be forced to disclose it on their wine label.

With that being said, I’m by no means waving a “pro-Organic” wine flag.  What I’m trying to say is that making a delicious tasting wine is like making a great food recipe – if you add too little or too much of an ingredient, your recipe is not going to turn out the way you planned it.  So far in 2009, I’ve tasted a lot of bad recipes because these wines were drowned in additives and lacking in the fruit department.  Finally, if wineries are loading us up with a lot of other stuff besides crushed grapes, shouldn’t we be made aware of whatever it is that we’re drinking, just like any other beverage?