Washington - Behind the picturesque rows of grapevines at vineyards around the world, winemakers are bending the truth.
It’s not the sort of thing most wine drinkers would have noticed, because it’s happening behind the scenes, before bottles are shipped out, and it’s tough to tell by taste. But it’s hard to imagine anyone would appreciate it.
Many winemakers have been a little loose with the information shared on their labels. Not with the region, vineyard, year and varietal, which people – both expert and not – look to when buying wine, but with the alcohol content, which they have been misreporting on bottles for decades.
The percentages reported on bottles aren’t the precise measurements consumers likely believe them to be.
A number of factors, including tastes, expectations, associations, rating systems and even international tax laws appear to be nudging winemakers to round the alcoholic kick of their respective wines up or down a notch on labels in ways that might make the bottles more attractive to prospective drinkers. And the problem is widespread.
“The errors, whether deemed ‘small’ or ‘large’, are systematic,” said Kate Fuller, who teaches agricultural economics at Montana University.
Last year, Fuller, along with a team of researchers that included Julian Alston, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics of the University of California at Davis, and James Lapsley, a retired professor who has written and researched extensively about wine, set out to test two theories. The first was something experts have been warning about for some time: that wines, for various reasons, have been getting more alcoholic. The second was something else: that winemakers have been inaccurately reporting the alcoholic contents of their wines.
The team dusted off data from The Liquour Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), which oversees and tests all wine imported for sale in Ontario, Canada. The sample included more than 127 000 wines (roughly 80 000 of them red, 47 000 of them white) imported over the 18 years between 1992 and 2009. And it told an interesting tale.
As suspected, wines are getting boozier. On average, they were about a percentage point stronger in 2009 (13.8 percent alcohol by volume) than they were in 1992 (12.7 percent). “There was growth in alcohol percentage in every country,” the researchers wrote.
Some suspect that global warming and the rising heat index, which could be altering an already fussy production process, are to blame. Michael Kaiser, who is the director of public affairs for Wine America, a national association that represents American wineries, says the sugar content of the grape, which in turn affects the alcohol content of the wine, is altered by climate.
But Fuller and the team believe it has less to do with external factors thanwith the practices of the actual winemakers. “Our findings lead us to think that the rise in alcohol content of wine is primarily man-made, even if as an unintended consequence of choices made by grape growers and winemakers,” they wrote.
Kaiser, for his part, admits that evolving tastes might be playing a role, too. “The palette of the consumer is probably partly to blame,” he said. “Americans tend to like sweeter beverages. So winemakers might be leaving the grapes on a little longer to get a wine that is a little fruitier and has a higher alcohol content.”
Many winemakers, however, don’t appear to want to let consumers know about the trend. In fact, they seem to be going out of their way to conceal it. The analysis uncovered a sizable discrepancy between the alcohol content reported on bottles and the actual alcohol amount observed during testing, largely due to systemic underreporting.
It’s legal, at least in the US, where wines with 14 percent alcohol by volume or less are allowed to have a range of 1.5 percentage points from the amount stated on the bottle. In Australia and New Zealand, it’s 1.5 percentage points, too. And in Europe, the permitted range is half a percentage point, which is about as stringent as it gets.
Nearly 60 percent of the more than 100 000 bottles observed had more alcohol by volume than their bottles would lead people to believe, while just a shade over 20 percent had less.
On average, wines around the world tended to understate the alcohol percentage by volume by 15 percentage points.
While it’s hard to pin down the precise reasons for the prevalence of these inaccuracies, there are a few things that are likely at play.
There is, for one, something practical: taxes. In the US, for instance, wines with more than 14 percent alcohol by volume are taxed at a higher rate. Bulk winemakers, especially those selling some of the cheaper wines, might be underreporting the alcohol content of their offerings in order to avoid the added tax.
At the heart of the discrepancy, however, is a funny little tug of war wine drinkers are forcing producers to partake in. People – on the whole – tend to favour wines that are less alcoholic. This alone means that all things equal, rounding alcohol percentages down is better than rounding up (and, of course, not rounding at all). But it’s being exacerbated by a concurrent demand for wine with more intense and ripe flavours.
Washington Post