Wine & Food | Professor Bainbridge

Italian Wine Woes

Italian authorities are investigating incidents of adulterated wine, prompting the government on Friday to play down fears of another health scare like the one that hit mozzarella cheese last week. A news magazine revealed that police were investigating the cheap end of the market for adding harmful chemicals into wine.

... Police in the far north and south of Italy found evidence that cheap wine was being cut with sugar and sulphuric and hydrochloric acid, L’Espresso said.

Two thoughts. (1) I’ve never been a fan of cheap Italian wine, for which I’m now grateful. For one thing, this isn’t the first time low-end Italian producers were found to have adulterated their wines. (2) Like the rest of the EU, Italy is sitting on a lake of surplus wine. So the problem can’t be that they need more wine. Presumably they were trying to tweak wines that were low in alcohol and acids to “improve” the flavor. But with “sulphuric and hydrochloric acid”?

From the same report:

In a separate investigation at the luxury end, 600,000 bottles of vintage Brunello di Montalcino have been seized by investigators who suspect winemakers used grapes other than Sangiovese, the only ingredient allowed in the Tuscan wine, a favourite of U.S. connoisseurs, L’Espresso magazine reported.

This is not a health issue, so much as an image issue. Personally, however, I’m not hung up on the idiocies of EU wine rules. As a Californian, blending varietals is old hat. If a producer thinks he can improve his blend by adding other grapes, I say “have at it.” Where traditionalists see fraud, I see civil disobedience.

Posted on Friday, April 04 2008 | Permalink

This story though brings up the issue that brands such as Champagne, Port and Sherry face in the wine market. A recent national poll suggests that name protection is an important topic for consumers, as they should be well-informed of their choices in wines and where they originate from. Blending wines further confuses wine consumers about where their purchases originate. Instead, wine producers should embrace the fact that consumers need to be accurately educated about and protected from deceptive claims on food and beverage labels.

Posted by on 04/04 at 01:26 PM

A lot of what “Center for Wine Origins” said makes sense (except for the whole blending wine confuses people), but it’s not just about name recognition. “Brunello” is the region’s name for the Sangiovese grape. It’s not mere civil disobedience to blend other varietals (although the California versus traditionalist; New World versus Old World debates of terroir, regulation, etc. will always be heated, epic, and ultimately unresolvable), it’s outright lying. Adding other varietals to Brunello and calling it Brunello is mislabelling. The producers of these Brunellos are free to instead make whatever wine they please as VdT and call it Sangiovese/Brunello and Nebbiolo (or whatever), but they’re trying to have it both ways - use a popular name that is popular precisely because it means something AND make this wine in a fashion different from what the name means. Plus, the civil disobedience argument works only if these winemakers were shooting for “artistic expression.” Without knowing more about the case, I would guess they were shooting more for “making more money.” At the end of the day, I agree: regulation stymies creativity (the additional benefit it provides consumers comes at the expense of producers). But that doesn’t mean you have to defend everybody who breaks the rules.

Posted by on 04/04 at 02:49 PM

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.