Bit o' this, bit o' that – additives in wine

 One of the most common topics that come up whenever I give a wine tutorial is the subject of ‘additives’. Maybe because disasters, scams and scandals fascinate us – particularly the 1985 ‘antifreeze’ débacle that went a good way towards wiping out German and Austrian wine exports.

Yet, of all the processed food and drink we partake of, wine is arguably the most natural. Compared to, say, a tin of baked beans or a bottle of cola, the number of added substances in wine is minute. Most wine-producing countries impose stringent legislation, publishing lists of permitted additives.

The most common is sulphur dioxide, a germicide and anti-oxidant widely used throughout the food and beverage industries. It is non-toxic to all except a microscopic percentage of consumers. When used to excess its presence is easily detected by a smell so off-putting it would most likely cause drinkers to go ‘yech!’

The levels of sulphur dioxide present in wine are very low in comparison to those of other food products. In a litre of wine, somewhere between 13 and 80 milligrams would be the norm. Whereas if you bought a salad in a so-called health bar you could be consuming as much as 200 milligrams per litre.

The health-conscious consumer would be alarmed if the bunch of grapes in his shopping trolley was labelled ‘contains acid’ but this is in fact true. Malic, lactic and tartaric acids are all naturally present in the fruit. The addition of these acids and also ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) is virtually a standard practice in New World winemaking, being to fine-tune the Ph in order to make the wine a better product. The Old World, by and large, takes a more ‘purist’ approach although, in certain circumstances, acidity adjustment may be permitted.

The other major additive is sugar – in the form of grape sugar or refined beet or cane sugar, a process known as ‘chaptalisation’ (from Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Napoleon’s minister for agriculture, who first sanctioned its use). EC countries have complex regulations. Put simply permission to chaptalise on a yearly basis may be granted in the colder Northern regions; in more moderate zones, it is authorised only in poor years and in warmer southern climes chaptalisation is not permitted at all. It’s worth pointing out that the process does not make the wine sweeter. It gives the wine a more substantial ‘mouthfeel’. The wondrous thing is that the perfect grape needs none of these additives in order to make majestic wine. Trouble is, we don’t live in a perfect world.

Wine’s first additive, of course, was yeast, our oldest industrial micro-organism. It’s likely that man used this wondrous component even before he learned to write. Hieroglyphics tell us that that ancient Egyptians were using yeast and the process of fermentation to produce alcoholic beverages and to leaven bread over 5,000 years ago. Nevertheless, the biochemical process of fermentation was not comprehended, and was looked upon by man as a mysterious and maybe even magical phenomenon.

It is believed that these early fermentation systems for alcohol production and bread making were formed by natural microbial contaminants of flour, other milled grains and from fruit or other juices containing sugar. Such microbial flora would have included wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that are found associated with cultivated grains and fruits. ‘Leaven’ – referred to in the Bible – was a soft putty-textured medium, a small portion which was used to start or leaven each new bread dough and, subsequently each new batch of wine. Over the course of time, the habit of saving a ‘good’ batch of wine, beer or dough for inoculating the next batch took root.

It was not until the invention of the microscope followed by the pioneering scientific work of Louis Pasteur in the late 1860’s that yeast was identified as a living organism and the agent responsible for alcoholic fermentation and dough leavening.