When I buy beans at the grocery store, I turn around all the cans to see the ingredients. Well, pre-pandemic I did. It could take me more than five minutes to decide on a can of beans. My wife is very patient with this.
I always look for the fewest ingredients. Ideally: "Black beans, water, salt." Lately, I have bought more canned beans with calcium chloride added than I prefer, but these are unusual times.
I do this with (almost) everything I buy at the grocery store: hot sauce, frozen seafood dumplings, crackers, whatever. I prefer organic produce and organic milk but sometimes buy conventional if it's much cheaper, because I'm not wealthy.
I am like a Millennial consumer. I care about what I put in my body.
The one grocery store item that gets away with revealing nothing about its contents is wine. Food products are required by law in most countries to reveal everything in them. But wine has always gotten a pass.
The EU is moving to change that. Wine-Searcher ran a story this week that the European Commission is drafting legislation to require ingredients in wine to be listed on the label.
Hurray for the EU! It's about time.
The US will fight this. Our wine politics are dominated by our biggest wine companies. They don't want people knowing what goes into supermarket wine, because they fear, correctly, that consumers will gravitate toward wines with fewer additives.
White Claw shows the way
For the wine industry as a whole, this is short-sighted. The absence of ingredient labeling is hurting the industry now and the pain is only going to increase as boomers – who will drink liquid nacho cheese from a squeeze bottle – age out of the market.
Look at White Claw, easily the fastest-growing alcoholic beverage in the US. White Claw uses the standard US Nutrition Facts label that appears on every can of beans, every jar of hot sauce, and every box of milk sold in the United States. People are accustomed to looking for that label.
Wineries complain that the Nutrition Facts box is big and blocky and will ruin their beautiful back labels. White Claw has no such concerns, even though its cans are less than half the size of a wine bottle.
White Claw also prominently says "gluten free", satisfying that craze. Almost all wine is gluten-free, but do you ever see that on a wine label? Well, why not?
The thing about White Claw is, it doesn't even list the ingredients on the label! But it LOOKS like it lists the ingredients, because it says it's made from "a blend of seltzer water, our gluten free alcohol base and a hint of fruit flavor". If you check the company's website you see that most flavors also contain cane sugar, citric acid and sodium citrate. You might say: "See, even White Claw doesn't list all the ingredients on the label."
To which I respond, show me on winery websites where they list ingredients at all.
What it says on the box
Ingredient labeling would be GREAT for most wineries. Your wines are on the shelf and they say: "Ingredients: Grapes, yeast, sulfites."
Ridge, an extremely honest California winery, lists ingredients on its labels and lets consumers decide. Ridge lists "oak from barrel aging" as an ingredient though to me that's not strictly necessary, because oak barrels are a process, not an additive. Oak use is an interesting question that I don't know if the EU is going to take on. If Ridge adds water or calcium carbonate, they 'fess up.
But almost every other winery is completely opaque about additions that the natural wine crowd complains about at every opportunity, like Velcorin, which is toxic, and acetaldehyde, which can cause headaches. There are 76 approved additives for wine in the US, and many have scary names, even if they're innocuous.
In the food industry, producers have to decide whether adding a scary-sounding chemical is really necessary. Wineries should also have to make this calculation: let consumers decide if we mind drinking potassium bitartrate or ethyl maltol.
For years wineries have been happy to not raise the subject. Baby boomers, who buy a lot of crunchy snacks with flavors cooked up in a lab in New Jersey, mostly don't care. It was better to avoid the topic than to raise it.
Those days are over with the Millennial generation. Wine has, for many young adults, lost its farm-product image. The fact that people who care about their health can see a completely manufactured product like White Claw (our "gluten free alcohol base"? What is it? Where did it come from?) as somehow cleaner and healthier than grapes left in a vat to ferment is proof.
Plus, the natural wine crowd is running around social media claiming conventional wine is full of poison. It's an unfair charge, but say it enough and it lands, because wineries don't fight back. I watched such an online debate last weekend, by one guy with an agenda claiming all conventional wine is full of herbicides. You know who argued with him? A couple of wine bloggers. You know who didn't say a word? Anybody from a winery.
Wineries have their head in the sand on this issue as the world is changing around them. The EU initiative to label ingredients in wine will be good for consumers. It also will be good for wineries, as it will force them to examine their practices, and say: "Is isinglass (from fish bladders) really necessary?" (Answer: no.)
Most wine – yes, even most conventional wine – is a very natural product. But it doesn't look like it when you pick up the bottle. If wine were a can of beans, I would not buy it. I would buy a can of something that tells me what's in it.
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May 24, 2020 at 07:01AM
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Time for US Wine to Follow the EU - Wine-Searcher
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