Ingredient Labelling for Wine

One way to have some control over your health is by checking the ingredients in consumables. How much fat, sodium, sugar, etc. is in the product? Wine, and other alcoholic beverages, rarely do that. Why?

One of the few wines with ingredients listed

Food laws come under the Food and Drug Administration. Wine is regulated by the Treasury Department because it's historically been about collecting the "sin tax." Wineries still have to prove that any additives are safe, but they don't have to list them on the label, so the vast majority don't.

Most people only know about sulfur because there's a warning label on the bottle. Many have heard about organic wine, organic grapes, biodynamic, and natural wines that often just adds to the confusion.

One of the local wineries to go with full disclosure is Ridge Lytton Springs. For years, they've listed the wine varietal blend right on the front. Their back labels and website have an ingredient list. An example:

Hand harvested estate grapes; indigenous yeasts; naturally occurring malolactic bacteria; 0.84% water addition; tartaric acid; oak from barrel aging; SO2.

You'll need to know something about winemaking to understand this, but it's here for you and Google to discover. 

There's a lot of other stuff that can be added. All are safe for consumption, of course. A few of these are tannin, sugar, copper sulfate, egg whites, gelatin, and calcium carbonate. They are used to improve the wine as the winemakers sees fit.

You should have the right to know, but not every winemaker is enthused by the idea. Sometimes because some of these might be scary sounding like copper sulfate (eww, I'm drinking copper)? Well, no, but if you don't do some investigation, you might think so. It's a fining agent to remove off odors.

Also, you'd quickly find out that the big producers of those "industrial wines" might have a very long list of ingredients like Mega Purple and other things they'd rather you didn't know about.

It would be nice to know what's in the bottle, even if it's just listed on their website.  Maybe a QR code on the back label that links to the wine's ingredients on the winery's website. Not wanting to do it makes it look like you're trying to hide something.