High & Low Quality Wines

This isn't about points or awards, it's about ingredients. A more natural product vs. one manipulated by lots of chemicals. Many people check ingredient labels when grocery shopping. What about the alcoholic beverages that you consume? Well, there's a problem.

Back label of a Ridge/Lytton Springs wine
Why aren't more wineries doing this?

 
Unfortunately, you don't see that with wine because ingredient labeling isn't required, yet anyway. Why? It's bureaucracy really. The U.S. the Food and Drug Administration regulates food and drug safety, and even things like cosmetics. Alcohol is under Treasury, as it has always been about collecting taxes. 

Yeah, it's pretty dumb from a consumer's point-of-view. There are people who want to see ingredients listed on a wine, but not enough yet, so this change has never gotten enough support.

You can make a decent guess by knowing some things about a winery. This blog post is inspired by an article from mashed.com Wine Brands That Use the Highest and Lowest Quality Ingredients. While I don't agree 100% with everything they say, it's a good start to help you find the best quality wines. Also, this article contains a very small list of good wines and bad wines. You can make educated guesses on other wines as to what might be on the good and bad sides ingredient-wise.

One thing I want to point out in the article, they mention Avaline, a celebrity wine that has "zero concentrates, colors, or added sugars, and absolutely no producers that use synthetic pesticides." Concentrates would mean Mega Purple or similar, so that's good. Color additives don't often happen in wine, and must be declared on the label. Sugar cannot be added by U.S. law, any sweetness comes from the residual sugars in the grapes. No synthetic pesticides mean organic pesticides can still be used. So the bits about colors and sugar are marketing BS. In my mind, this would knock them off the good list just for making this stuff up.

Like the article says, there are literally hundreds of ingredients that can go into a wine. The places I'm familiar with only use a few, and I expect that's common with smaller wineries. Regardless, you still have a right to know what these are, whether it's a few or a long list of things you've never heard of.

In my opinion, the best ways to look for high quality:

• The wine is labeled with the ingredients (the easiest way to know)
• Organic wines (strictest control over what and how much can be used in a vineyard and a wine)
• Wine made with organically farmed grapes (strict control over the vineyard, so I would assume they will make the wine with care, also)
• Small, family wineries (farm families are more likely to care about the product and the land vs. a large corporation)

Wine you might want to avoid for quality reasons:

• Wines found everywhere because there are millions of cases made (these industrial wines use chemistry to get the wine tasting the way it does)
• Wines that seem impossibly inexpensive (this is done through chemistry)
• Mass-market wines that taste the same every year (Mother Nature doesn't work this way. This is, again, done through chemical additions)

None of these are guaranteed to get you the least amount of additives, but it's something to think about when shopping.

A note on a couple of mass market premium priced wines: 

You may have heard of Meiomi Pinot Noir or Caymus Cabernet. Meiomi produces hundreds of thousands of cases of wine each year; Caymus tens of thousands. These wines show up in a lot of retail shops. Both are loaded with sugar, many times more than found in a typical dry table wine. It turns out, the American palate that grew up on soda can easily be swayed to love a sweet wine. Is this bad or wrong? Not necessarily, as it all comes down to what you like. Just understand, you are not getting the typical California table wine; you're getting a highly manipulated product to appeal to the Pepsi generation.