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Adding
flavour: a South African wine scandal? It is likely that even anyone following wine news over the
last few weeks will have picked up on the scandal stories concerning
South African wine. A well-respected SA wine journalist has blown the
whistle on producers who have been adding artificial flavourings to
their Sauvignon Blanc. How else, reports ask, could Sauvignons from
such warm vineyard areas have these distinctive grassy,
gooseberry-like characteristics? These flavour additives are synthetic
versions of the compounds found naturally in such wines, so they are
very hard to detect and police. Of course, if anyone has been adding flavour additives,
it’s wrong and could damage the image of the Cape wine industry very
badly. Wine is seen as a natural product whose flavour derives from
the grapes and traditional winemaking techniques. It would lose a lot
of its appeal if people thought that the wine was being manufactured
so blatantly. However, there’s one big problem with the story as it
stands. We don’t have any names, and we lack any evidence. The real
scandal is the way the press have responded to this story, and the way
it was broken in the first place. As a wine journalist, you hear a lot
of gossip. Sitting round the table chatting to winemakers there are
all sorts of juicy titbits of inside info being disclosed. But these
are not stories. It’s poor journalism to go to press without solid
evidence and names. You don’t risk casting a cloud over the entirety
of a nation’s winemakers by publishing a generalized accusation. And the press are also guilty of seizing on this story and
circulating it in the absence of names and evidence. It is being
discussed as a fait accompli. Rumour has become fact. From now
on whenever journalists try a grassy aromatic SA Sauvignon, they’ll
be thinking, ‘Is this for real?’. This story is a non-story and
should have been allowed to die, or at least writers should have held
fire until they had some solid evidence when it really would have been
a big story. As it stands, they have just cast a cloud across the
whole industry and damaged innocent reputations of innocent producers
as well as any that might have been cheating. Of course, this also raises the deeper question of what
constitutes legitimate manipulation of wine flavour. I’m sure that
everyone would agree that bunging flavour chemicals into a vat of wine
is wrong. I suspect, however, that there exist widespread
disagreements about other manipulations. In industrial winemaking the
choice of yeast strain is important in imparting specific flavour
profiles to wines. Some people object to this, but they’d probably
be happy about manipulations such as leaving the wine on its lees
(dead yeast cells) or lees stirring, both of which can affect flavour.
Oak barrels are a traditional element of winemaking, and
can add flavour both directly and by allowing a limited but steady
supply of oxygen. But is it legitimate to use oak chips and
microoxygenation to achieve the same ends? And then we have reverse
osmosis to concentrate must or later on to remove alcohol (new and
controversial), and chaptalization to increase the sugar content of
the must (old and widely accepted). It’s hard to be dogmatic about what’s right and
what’s wrong in winemaking. To a large degree, we can’t consider
all wines alike in this respect: some are being marketed as artisanal,
traditional, finely crafted estate wines, whereas others are clearly
sold as mass produced branded plonk with no lofty pretensions. Back to South Africa. Journalists on the ground there need
to get to the bottom of this fast, and come up with names and hard
evidence. They should stop making generalized allegations. The
industry there should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty –
it’s only fair. Good producers will be damaged by these sorts of
reports, and the cheating producers will be given warning to cover up
their tracks. As for regulation, in many French wine regions shops
aren’t allowed to sell sugar to winemakers without these sales being
recorded and notified to the local authorities, to reduce the risk of
illegal chaptalization. Surely sales of flavouring chemicals in South
Africa could be similarly policed. It would be a start. |