With food it’s about how many locations a business has, presumably not to place unreasonable burden on small businesses. Whole Foods and all larger sit-down restaurant chains also now have calorie counts. Fast food is not singled out.
It’s similar with small wineries. Mass market grape juice or orange juice can be manufactured to be essentially the same, year after year. It doesn’t vary according to vintage, isn’t vineyard designated or produced in 50 to few hundred case lots, and the economics of requiring nutrition labels would have a much large impact for wineries that juice producers.
Do the oranges or grapes or apples you buy come with nutrition labels? Those are at least as relevant comparisons as mass market orange juice or grape juice.
-Al
Not all foods list their ingredients. Ice cream, for example, rarely includes ingredient information. Some do, but the vast majority do not.
Beer is another example.
There is a common thread here. All of these items have a common factor: strong lobbyists.
Orange juice doesn’t, either. Haven’t looked at other juices, but know that OJ does not.
-Al
I’m too lazy to go down to my basement to find a can of frozen OJ, but I am pretty sure that OJ lists its ingredients, whether it is frozen, reconstituted concentrate, or fresh squeezed. It is possible that it has only one ingredient, but I believe it is listed as such.
Someone please run down to your fridge and tell us. We will wait right here.
The labeling on OJ is actually rather bogus. The not from concentrate stuff from large producers spends a lot of time in giant tanks, long enough that it needs to be “refreshed” with “flavor packs”. These flavor packs also give each brand a consistent and somewhat unique flavor. The contents of the flavor packs are derived from oranges and orange rinds, but include chemicals that do not appear naturally in oranges. They don’t have to be listed as additives, because they are made from oranges but they are certainly not “natural”. I suppose the OJ lobby played a role in the regulations.
Note that some of the additives people want listed for wine were derived from grapes.
-Al
I couldn’t find any OJ to look at, but I did find ice cream. Surprise! My two tubs of ice cream list their ingredients! So either I am completely wrong about ice cream being exempt, or my two producers are voluntarily disclosing. Like Ridge voluntarily discloses. Do they disclose on all of their bottles?
Just one more millennial perspective on this: my wife has gone on the keto diet, and as such, wine is allowed but only if it has minimal carbs, which can be derived from the residual sugar content. It’s wild how many producers don’t post this anywhere, even just a website tech sheet! It’s frustrating because I’m reasonably sure a lot of these French whites have pretty low RS levels but without being sure, she won’t drink it. We can’t be the only ones - I’d imagine not posting some of this info just drives people towards the shadier “clean wine”-marketing outfits.
How low does she want her daily carb total to be?
-Al
She’s doing 18 a day right now. With RS of less than 2g/L, give or take, she can do two glasses and have them be about a carb total.
Yes, would be a bit less than a gram of carbs. If she wants to have two normal sized glasses and hold it under a gram, I can see the interest in labeling. But, it’s 3 or 4 calories and if she doubled the carbs from the wine, I doubt it makes much difference in the diet (would still be at low total carbs).
-Al
Well here’s an Oregon winery, Sokol Blosser, going for it. But they missed the part about folks wanting to know RS 
, especially for certain wine styles such as the rosé featured in the article. As an aside, just another example of how easy it is for products in general (food, drinks of all sorts, etc) to hide sugar levels…. Taxing sugar drinks is the only way to reduce consumption, not labeling regs (recent US study on this). Article from WineBusiness
Yep, and in the absence of that information people will probably look at the carbohydrates info on the label and assume that it’s all sugar, which can lead to erroneous choices for reasons of both diet and personal taste. Taking their 2023 Rose of Pinot Noir, at 3.5g per 148 mL, that’s ~23g/L of carbohydrates. But I would expect the RS on this wine to be somewhere at or below 5 g/L. The remaining “carbohydrates” are, I would expect, mostly glycerol (5-8 g/L) and organic acids (5-10 g/L). Whether or not you want to think of organic acids as carbs from a dietary perspective is a nutritional question that most people don’t really think about.
This is related to how carbohydrates are measured in the laboratory. The most common and easiest way is the difference method, which essentially assumes that everything that isn’t water, protein, fat, alcohol, or ash (what’s left when you burn it) is carbohydrates. As a result, carbohydrate labelling is typically the least accurate and helpful part of a nutritional facts panel. Some wine lobbying groups have attempted to get this changed in anticipation of nutritional labeling requirements for wine, and for wine-based products that already require nutritional labeling, but to my knowledge they haven’t seen any progress.
Right? I was shocked not to see the RS. Interesting to know how carbs are measured.
This article mentions European regs. Do we know more?
Wow. The full list of stabilizing agents, etc., is included. Also the use of inert gas must be disclosed. This will be interesting, but my guess is that it will lead to more wines with less “intervention”, and we’ll see fewer “stable” wines (etc) over time because the average person doesn’t want to see a long list of strange sounding ingredients on the bottle (common practices such as bentonite … I’m not sure I want that on my label! The bentonite is completely settled and removed from the finished wine, but it is used to protect against a haze forming, especially in a white wine…). Some of this would be great— if the public would accept hazy wines, similar to a hazy beer or cider, that would be wonderful. The use of stabilizing agents such as bentonite does have a small, but negative effect on aromatics and flavor (thus the importance of bench trials to use the absolute min. amount needed.).
The one thing I don’t see is a nutritional analyses exclusion for small producers, similar to cider and beer under 7% ABV in the US (regulated by FDA, requires a nutritional analysis, but small producers are excluded due to the cost — nutritional analyses are not required for any product over 7%ABV, regulated by the TTB)