Mega Purple, what exactly is in our wine ?

WINE TALK
21

Not that I don’t love and trust Ridge but since wine ingredients are not required or regulated you cannot be sure.

22

Tears of Gypsy virgins.

23

Blood of Christian children. Or is that matzoh?

24

Randall Graham is who is leading that movement. Paul Draper is an early adopter.

There’s a big difference between not disclosing something you don’t have to and making false claims.

There are regulations about what can be added, and limits on other things. Concentrates like Mega Purple are grape products for a reason. It might be a bit loophole-y, but it’s a legal way to add sugar and/or color. There are legal limits on things like copper and sulfites.

Some of the oft cited “ingredients” aren’t really ingredients. A fining agent bonds with the undesired component and drops out of solution. Egg whites are used because tannins bond with proteins. They’re very low impact. The problem with some fining agents is they may remove something good as well, which is why those ones tend to be used as a last resort, rather than a matter of course.

Products like Velcorin break down quickly, so doesn’t exist in a wine. It’s used in all commodity juice, such as orange and apple, that you buy at the store. It kills microbes, so you don’t have funny stuff happening in the bottle. Some (well respected) winemakers swear by it, others think it has a negative impact. Randall Graham switched from the former to the later view a few years back.

25

How common is it for wineries to add sugar? I mean among the wineries we tend to enjoy here.

26

I guess you’d have to ask Kendall Jackson, Rombauer, Caymus, and Steele…then go from there.

27

Perish the thought. Chaptalization is illegal in California.

28

Did not know this. That’s a relief.

29

Isn’t the reality the opposite of that? Wineries sometimes add sugar in places where grapes struggle to achieve ripeness, like cool vintages in Oregon and Burgundy. There is no need to add sugar to most California wines, including if you want to produce an ultra-ripe wine like Rombauer Chardonnay or Caymus 40th. You can harvest grapes in Napa Valley at 30+ Brix most years if that’s what you want.

I realize most of the responses in this thread are glib, and that’s fine, but I think the wines that we discuss and care about here on WB, as opposed to bulk industrial type wines, have extremely little added. You usually add yeast to start fermentation and maybe some yeast food, you add sulfites at a few points to protect the wine from oxidation and contamination, most wines sit in oak barrels at some point, you may add malolactic bacteria to start the malolactic fermentation, and in probably a small percentage of instances, sugar might be added to the must to extend the fermentation and to boost the alcohol level, or tartaric acid might be added to make the wine more acidic, or something like egg white or diatomaceous earth might be added for fining purposes or to soften harsh tannins.

And these are miniscule additions to wine, plus most of them drop out of the wine before it ends up in your bottle. They’re interesting if you want to know how wine is made, but they’re irrelevant in terms of you the customer being worried about you drinking them in your bottle of Bordeaux or Sonoma Pinot.

As part of the WB ritual piling on to ripe/modern styled wines, all kinds of allegations are made about how the wines got that way. But I think most of those kinds of wines are just the result of harvesting very ripe grapes and using a lot of new oak – you don’t have to engage in a bunch of sinister and secretive laboratory stuff and add scary chemicals to make wines from places like California, Washington, Southern Rhone, Priorat, Chile and Australia which are ripe, dark and lush.

30

Agreed, but that wasn’t my point, and it is a start.

JD

31

It has been a few years since I looked at the numbers, but if we take the stated production of MegaPurple and assume that all of it was going into wine (versus other products which it might be used in), then approximately 4% of the wine gallons produced in the USA had MegaPurple.

With regard to labeling of ingredients (Ridge, Bonny Doon), I am sure they are doing it for the right reasons, but I have questions about how it is done. For example, when Ridge lists on the lable “indigenous yeasts” as an ingredient in the wine, but you then read in the tech sheet that the wine is sterile filtered (removing said yeast), I have to wonder if the information being provided to the consumer is really helpful.

Adam Lee
Siduri Wines

32

Yeah, none of those phenolics, terpenes, esters and whatnot.

RT

33

Agreed, I wish all labeling was more like Ridge, they are one of the most transparent, as well as telling a short story of the growing season, Harvest and aging.

34

I’ve never had the fortune to work with mega purple but my understanding is that very little of it goes a long way. So that is probably worth noting when looking at percentages.

Also, I wonder if its being used in the bulk wine industry or just “premium” wines. That would change the percentage considerably depending on the answer.

35

Berry,

I also haven’t had the pleasure…but here are the figures I came up with back when (copying from another post)

According to the manufacturer, who has a vested interest in saying how important MegaPurple is, 20% of the 50,000 gallons produced is sold to the wine business (which tells you, first, that if you want to worry about MegaPurple, then worry about it in the foods you eat and non-wine drinks you drink. And I don’t believe you’ve ever seen it listed on a label there.). —

So 10,000 gallons are sold to the wine business. At an addition rate of .2% that means 5 million gallons of wine have MegaPurple in them. The United States produces approximately 575 million gallons of wine a year. MegaPurple being added to red wine only that mean 2% of the wines (4% of the red wines) have MegaPurple added to them. Undoubtedly there are other concentrates out there --but to advertise MegaPurple as ubiquitous is simply not true. I’m sure Constellation would like it to be true – but it isn’t.

Adam Lee
Siduri Wines

36

Wes,

You might want to mention that, though Velcorin is used in many juices and even Gatorade from what I’ve been told, it does act quite differently in wine. In the presence of alcohol, one of its by-products is methanol . . . and wineries are not required to test for the methanol levels in their wines, though there is a legal limit. And some wineries are even using velcorin (or vitamin V as some call it) at racking as well as at bottling. Why is it being used as much as it is? Yes, it does have a quick short life. And yes, it is very effective at killing live yeast cells (that’s what it targets, not other microbes as far as I’ve heard). And the main reason? Wineries can use this instead of filtering if they are worried about brett or anything else - and still market their wines as ‘unfiltered’ . . .

Cheers.

37

Berry,

Have not worked with it either, but your comment about a little goes a long way can be said for most ‘additives’ and ‘fining agents’ in wine.

Consider milk used for fining. How much is added to remove a touch of bitterness in wine? 1 gallon is blended into approximately 1000 gallons to achieve this - and then is racked off so that no ‘residual milk’ is left in the finished wine.

The chemical reactions that take place with many of these are so strong and so immediate that it continues to amaze me . . .

As far as mega purple, have not worked with - but at a former winery I worked at, we did use ‘concentrate’ at times to add a touch of RS to wines that ‘needed it to pop the fruit’ . . .

Cheers!

38

Illegal in California . . .

That said, in cooler years, walk into a Smart and Final in Northern California and try to find 50lb bags of C and H :slight_smile: [stirthepothal.gif]

And though ‘chaptalization’ is illegal, it is perfectly legal to purchase ‘grape concentrate’, which is FULL of sugar, and add that.

Gotta love loopholes [soap.gif]

39

Larry,

And, to be fair, you may want to mention that one of the by-products of grape fermentation itself is methanol. neener

And (this is something I always want to bring up) Velcorin in approved for use in the EU as well…so if that is a concern we shouldn’t just look to wines from the USA.

Adam Lee
Siduri Wines

40

I agree entirely, Adam - yep, they’ve been using if for awhile over there . . . but just because that’s the case, doesn’t make it ‘right’, eh?!?! :slight_smile:

And also, we ALL know that alcohol levels are sooo much lower over there than here anyways . . .

Cheers!