I see a lot of wines advertise themselves on the label as being “gluten-free”. Is gluten really a problem in wines that should be considered. Or is it just another example of green-washing??
Tom
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What about MSG?
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My wife has celiacs and will strongly react to any gluten exposure. She has never had a problem with wine, and we never even thought to check. I think greenwashing might be indeed what is going on
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Some barrel producers use a flour (wheat) paste to seal the barrel at the heads. This doesn’t exactly translate to gluten in the wine but does provide a risk of exposure. Sylvain has been working on an allergen-free barrel for some time.
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Yep, they do. My wife is topically sensitive to gluten so she can’t have wines from producers that do this. There are some, but thankfully we haven’t found many of the top producers in Burgundy with this procedure.
A quick google seems to indicate this isn’t an issue.
Anyone know otherwise?
Has she actually experienced a reaction to wine, or are you just being careful prospectively to avoid any risk?
If the former, can you share a bit about what happened?
I’m not asking to be skeptical, but just trying to advance the conversation in this thread.
I spent some time looking into this in my retail days, and this conclusion is correct according to everything I’ve seen. There is no detectable gluten in any wine or spirits. Everyone I’ve talked to who has Celiac (including a couple with severe cases) has agreed with this. As far as people who think they have a reaction, nocebo effect is real (or whatever the correct term would be), and it’s easy to blame one cause when there’s actually a different, unrecognized one.
I dislike the “gluten free” marketing tool on these products because it is intentionally misleading, implying that some wines/spirits do contain gluten.
Yeah we figured it out because she got her common gluten symptoms and we were trying to track down where the exposure came from and then when we tracked it down to the wine, we started reading about what it could be and read about the gluten paste on the barrels. We haven’t been able to specifically confirm that’s the issue and not something else that somehow ends up in the wine, but that’s the most likely scenario we’ve identified.
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I’ve never seen that on a wine label and would be surprised to hear that there could be gluten in wine as we have to deal with the gluten thing a lot in our house.
In general, the labeling is a good thing even when it seems unnecessary. What a lot of folks don’t realize is that for someone with celiac disease, as my wife is, there is value in labelling food items as gluten free even when the product wouldn’t at first glance seem to have any gluten in it. A can of nuts for example where the nuts are processed on equipment that’s also used to process wheat-containing items can easily be cross-contaminated. The gluten free on the label tells us that’s not the case. She had to research in buying a Thanksgiving turkey because some brands have flour in that stuff they inject into the turkey to keep it moist when cooked. The list of examples could go on and on.
She has to be diligent because her ciliac disease is “silent” with no overt or immediate symptoms but still caused serious chronic health problems including osteopenia (low bone density) leading to osteoporosis (now improved after getting it diagnosed and off of gluten a few years ago).