I’ve always thought it was more complex than that.
Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted Bob as saying our wine makers mostly and deliberately target late picking grapes to maximise the alcohol content.
The management of acid including adjustment is routine in wine making. An assumption is that the acids are all natural food acids found in wine grapes.
There are wine producers who market on selected attributes such as organic, traditional etc. There are many interesting traditional methods of producing wine products.
Noted
Understood, thanks. But if you pick too early are the sugars too low for fermentation and the acids dominant? Like eating unripened fruit.
I guess part of the understanding is the difference between stone ground spelt bread vs Helgas at the supermarket. Both serve a market.
Up to a point yes. The acids are naturally occurring in wine, eg tartaric acid and wines can be, and frequently are, made with just the acids from the grapes. But it is legal to add extra if you want to that was not found in the grapes. Whether this is a bad thing, a good thing or doesn’t matter as long as the wine is good is opinion.
Correct. Unlike Europe where a cool summer with poor growth conditions can mean many grapes do not ripen correctly it is not legal in Oz to make up the missing sugar by adding some to the must.
I find it concerning that you aren’t worried about the laxness in our alcohol labelling laws in regard to wine. As far as I am aware, other alcoholic beverage makers do not have that ability to potentially mislead their customers. The alcohol level has significant ramifications in regard to health, legal liability etc and as this conversation is about the ability of consumers to seek lower alcohol wine it is highly relevant.
In regard to acidity, I may not have explained the situation clearly enough. As grapes increase in ripeness (sugar), the acidity drops. Therefore if winemakers wish to produce a traditional rich, sweet red wine they are often forced to add acid (amongst a plentiful cabinet of other additives) to end up with a balanced wine. Fine, if you’re happy with that, not so if you are amongst the ever growing sector of the population who prefer their food products to have minimal additives.
What is the explanation? You are in the industry, why is this flexibility given to table wines and not other fermented beverages? How does Oz compare with other countries in this respect?
If your concern is about what these may do for one’s health, this is a bit of a misnomer for wine or any alcohol beverages as alcohol/ethanol is a toxic substance to the human body. It is also possibly far worse than any approved wine additives (link in the previous paragraph) which may or may not still exist at the time of consumption.
How are they lax? The law is precise in what it permits.
A variation of 1.5% in 13% abv per example for table wine is approx 1 part in 9.
For mid strength beer a variation of 0.3% in 3.5% abv is approx 1 part in 12.
Not that great a proportionate difference in the overall variation permitted with those examples. Is there any cause for concern over variations in the final alcohol content of a table wine. I’ll suggest there is much greater error in the best guess of how full to fill the glass. Much more difficult than for a stubbie, can or standard beer glass.
I’m open minded to selecting products that have a lower alcohol content. I’ve done so with beer, for the little I consume. As for the the effects of excessive consumption, it’s the quantity that does most of the damage.
I am the same. I never check the alcohol content when buying wine and buy based on my own varietal and regional preferences (I enjoy reds which are deep in flavour and intensity such as durif). If a particular bottle is slightly higher or lower, I doesn’t worry me as it is the final product that matters rather than the alcohol content. I have tried some red low alcohol wines and they aren’t to my taste and would avoid them as a matter of preference.
You don’t see the need to be precise in alcohol measurement? Extraordinary! I must suggest to the NSW Highway Patrol that a 100km speed limit is really quite arbitrary and we should all be allowed to fudge that a bit.
To be fair a great number of our ‘measurements’ are averages under law. One that has been mentioned is the ‘e’ on prepacked foods.
While weight is not alcohol content much of the data on labels is average, not explicit per package although a requirement to be within some tolerances are usual.
A product such as wine, as was stated previously, will have a variation from cask to cask, and product made in real oak will be more variable than that from stainless vats with oak chips. In a practical sense standards does a reasonable thing in my view.
If a label stated 14.0% and an activist consumer tested it at 14.2% or 13.8% what outcome would be correct? Change production methodology? Get a gift card? Change labels to 14.0%+/-0.5% ?
I am not aware additives have been quantified, and the ingredients on a product label are listed with the ingredients used in the greatest amount first, followed in descending order by those in smaller amounts not by quantity or weight or percentage as a general rule.
Labelling or a section or special signage to highlight lower (average) alcohol wines may be helpful to some consumers. Going the next step on what is a naturally variable product?
Just in relation to this, the alcohol content would be equivalent to car speedometers and not the radar/laser gun of the police. In relation to speedometers, there is an accuracy tolerance as well, namely…
Australian Design Rule 18 sets out the accuracy standards for vehicle speedos. … The speedo must not indicate a speed less than the vehicle’s true speed or a speed greater than the vehicle’s true speed by an amount more than 10 percent plus 4 km/h.
If you are inferring that alcohol labelling needs to be 100% accurate to work out number of standard drinks to try and work out whether one is under the legal limit, I am yet to meet anyone that uses accurate volume measuring devices to measure wine when serving so that exact amount of wine consumed is known (and therefore exact amount of alcohol consumed can be calculated).
It is worth noting that alcohol affects everyone differently at different times and trying to consume exact amount of alcohol so one is just under the legal limit is treading a very fine line and fraught with danger as one can’t know how the alcohol will react within the body on a particular day.
No, I find that I can drink responsibly without such knowledge. I can ask just as easily why this is so important to you as you have not made much of a case for the current regulations being a problem.
The analogy with highway speed limits is quite irrelevant especially as you have no idea why the limits are set as they are.
Looking at the international situation the permitted range for table wine is variously .5, .8, 1, 1.5 percent alcohol by volume. Australia at 1.5 is at the top of the range but there are plenty of other countries up there with us. I could not find any explanation for why these figures have been adopted.
The fact that beer and fortified wines have narrower margins suggest to me that the reason for table wines being higher is related to the ability to control the final alcohol content. In beer making you can ferment a specific amount of sugar and get a beer of a predetermined strength. When fortifying you can calculate the amount of grape spirit of a known strength that needs to be added to get a final product of known content.
Chaptalisation (adding sugar) lets you control the final strength of table wine but it is not permitted in Oz. Cooler climates in North America and Europe are more likely to permit adding sugar but there is no obvious correlation between the permitted variation in range of table wine and whether chaptalisation is permitted internationally that I can see. Here the sugar content depends on the weather, when you pick etc.
So unless some expert likes to jump in and enlighten us we are rather in the dark about why the range is high in Oz, if it is a practical proposition to set it lower and what the consequences might be to the quality of wines if the range was narrowed.
What not pick the grapes at the right time rather than adding acid? Let’s face it, a percentage of wines in Colesworth stores are basically a factory made beverage with a large number of permitted additives. If that doesn’t worry you well that’s up to you but I find it concerning and contrary to the ethos of wine. Unfortunately the average consumer has no idea of what may be in their bottle and the processes it may have gone through to get to the final product. I suspect many would be concerned if they did.
Natural and organic wines can have additives as well, and many of these are not required to be labelled on the bottle. This article summarises some of the points which have been raised in this thread and also discusses the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘conventional’ wines:
While a wine may claim on the label that it doesn’t have any additives through wine production, it is likely that the grapes used for the wine production have been subject to the same agricultural practices as ‘conventional’ wines. including the use of pesticides to control disease and insects. There is a potential that safe levels of these pesticides is present in the final wine product irrespective of the method of winemaking.
Organic wines are different where the grape production is free of synthetic chemical inputs. The key word is synthetic as natural inputs can still be used to control pests and diseases. There are other threads in this forum which discuss the merits of organic and synthetic inputs and their potential impacts on human health (noting that organic input doesn’t necessarily mean safe).
As also highlighted in an earlier post, additives are allowed in the production of wines and many of these additives are not present in the final bottled wine. There is also little proof that any of these additives are more toxic than ethanol, the main byproduct of yeast fermentation, which is known to be toxic to the human body.
If one is concerned about potential additives to wine and their effect on one’s health, possibly one should evaluate whether one should consume any wine based on the known risks associated with ethanol consumption. This is irrespective of the wine’s alcohol concentration or potential additives included in the wine.
