OTT: Are You Drinking Fake Wine? And Does it Matter?

Photo by Micah Redfield

Fabricating Flavors:

If you were told that the glass of Merlot in your hand was engineered to taste as it does, would you care?

With the exception of sulfates, over sixty additives can be added to wine without being listed on the label. Fabricating wine’s aroma and flavor is becoming a big business.

Not all wine is prey to such seemingly underhanded treatment. But, for most Americans, who spend on average $9.89 per bottle, the results of this “wine development,” are likely to be encountered—even if unknowingly.

Photo by Tracy Allan, Q36 Creative, for Wine Enthusiast

Bianca Bosker, author of the recently published “Cork Dork,” and contributor for the likes of The New Yorker, WSJ and Food & Wine, recently wrote in the NYTimes of this laboratory side of the wine world.

Unsurprisingly, profits are the industry’s motivator. “The goal is to turn wine into an everyday beverage with the broad appeal of beer or soda,” Bosker writes. However, this adulteration of wine is not novel. Bosker cites the ancient Romans’ mixture of wine with pig’s blood and marble dust.

While no sane person would tolerate pig’s blood in their Sangiovese, what about oak dust (to mimic aging in French barrels), or tartaric acid (to amplify acidity)? Then there’s Mega Purple, “a grape-juice concentrate,” explains Bosker, “that has been called a ‘magic potion’ for its ability to deepen color and fruit flavors.” Why grow expensive grapes when you can simply add a magic potion?

But does all this wine engineering even matter?

The Experts Are Wrong
As the Journal of Wine Economics reported, between 2005 and 2009, of the 2,440 distinct wines entered into more than three tasting competitions, 47 percent won a gold medal. Of these winners, 84 percent failed to win any other award in any other competition—indicating, as the study states, “that winning a Gold medal is greatly influenced by chance alone.” Whatever had merited the gold medal was apparently lost on any other tasting judge; it was simply a matter of chance.

As Frédéric Brochet of the University of Bordeaux explains, expectations of a wine supersede what is actually in the glass.

As recounted by Jonah Lehrer of The New Yorker, Brochet flummoxed 54 wine experts by presenting them with two glasses of wine, a red and a white. Brochet had, in fact, poured two identical whites with tasteless red-coloring added to one. The experts’ tasting notes reflected their assumptions that the pigmented white was a red. Expectations had eclipsed reality. The same occurred when Brochet poured the same Bordeaux from two different bottles—one labeled a table wine, the other a grand-cru. The experts criticized the former and praised the latter. The single wine received disparate reviews, clearly based upon the expectations precipitated by the type of label.

So, if the experts find it difficult to accurately distinguish one wine from another, and if big, wine makers are “developing” their wines’ tastes, what are we to do?

In the end, perhaps we can take comfort in the ruse of it all, the “lot of nonsense and emperor's new clothes in the wine world,” as wine expert, James Hutchinson says. Perhaps we can simply drink what we like and find shame in neither the engineered $5.99 bottle, nor the $120 bottle that tastes nearly the same.

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