The Additive Debate: Michael Fridjhon
There is a view which says that as long as the winemaker has declared the truth (the whole truth and nothing but the truth) on the wine label, he should be free to do whatever is necessary to produce the best drink.
This argument, taken to its logical conclusion, legitimates any and all skulduggery: if you've told the wine drinker that you use oak essence, ox blood and fake raspberry, he can decide whether your product is worth its price. This approach seems, at first glance, to be quite attractive - it deregulates the international wine production rule book, offering consumers the same level of protection they enjoy over the purchase of a can of tomatoes. You are entitled to expect a list of ingredients: this list must be complete, and the authorities are merely obliged to ensure that nothing other than the specified items appear in the bottle of wine.
The great shortcoming of this argument (and given my natural propensity to anarchism you must accept that I don't ditch deregulation easily) is that it fails to take account of what it is that serious wine aficionados buy into when they purchase a bottle of wine. If you are simply treating wine as a reasonably low alcohol beverage, then you are involved with the idea of man and nature, of terroir, of the battle - each and every year - to make a wine which best expresses the complex set of circumstances which comprise that vintage. In this scenario, purity of fruit is paramount. So, the underlying theory goes, you can fiddle and tweak with structure, but not with the true expression of the grape. Adding acid adjusts the way the wine (rather than the grape) presents itself and can only enhance fruit that is already there.
Chaptalisation is not performed to sweeten the product, merely to increase the alcohol (for mouthfeel and ageing potential). The wine should still be fermented as dry as if the sugar had not been added.
Fining agents - whether egg whites, bentonite or oxblood - settle the matter in suspension and are entirely left behind at bottling. In this sense they are not additives. But extra tannin, sourced from another appellation (in fact, usually another country) is a substitute for fruit quality, and compromises authenticity. By the time you get to adding flavorants - however naturally obtained - you are no longer dealing with a viticultural statement. Instead you have a sauce, composed perhaps by a great chef, but an attempt nevertheless to disguise ordinary ingredients with extraordinary layerings.
The deregulators would argue that as long as you tell consumers that this is the deal, why should they expect any further protection. When you go to a restaurant, you take the quality of the raw materials for granted and wait to see what the kitchen can do with them. Certainly, there are conventions: you would expect chicken to be the main component of Chicken Maryland and you would be surprised if the sauce was made up of pineapples and ham.
Ingredient disclosure cannot replace label integrity: if the small print tells you that the product was made up of water, alcohol, natural fruit flavourings, oak essence, you are still entitled to expect that it was produced from grapes - at least if the packaging and appearance suggested that it was wine: a wine bottle implies wine, just as a bubbly bottle suggests fizz. It doesn't matter whether or not the words "wine" or "sparkling wine" appear on the label.
The problem of defining what is legitimate has particular relevance at this dawn of a new millennium. Science can so assist the winemaker's art that unless the rules are properly laid down and properly policed, the corners that can be cut may be greater than the length of the journey as a whole. Flavours extracted from greenpeppers produce aromas reminiscent of Loire Sauvignon Blanc to enhance wines produced in a climate too warm to retain the pyrazine notes sought by some judging panels; raspberries, blackcurrants, and bitter cherries yield aromatics which can be used to "upgrade" the bouquet of underripe or dilute reds.
There is some evidence that artificial flavorants - which are illegal - are readily available from wine industry suppliers in South Africa. It is a reasonable inference that they stock these essences because there is a market for them. This may mean that some of the more intense and strikingly flavoured wines have acquired their reputation simply by cheating. If this is so, the rest of the industry has been gravely disadvantaged: competitors are winning the race because they are not actually running in it but rather they have managed to get away with getting a lift; as importantly, when the deceit is revealed (as it inevitably must be) the credibility of the industry as a whole will suffer.
Is this a reason to rewrite an already rigorous rule book? Probably not - illegal substances are exactly that - they are in breach of existing law. But there is a major incentive for effective policing. Only by making sure that whatever compromises product integrity is policed and prosecuted out of existence can we be sure that the image of Cape wine is not being built on shifting sand.
