Sleuthing Out What's In Wine (Part two of four)
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| Sediment in your glass can be avoided if you decant your wine before pouring. | |
| Chronicle photo by Craig Lee | |
Flavor correctors
The most common addition to wine is acid. Almost all wines in California have their acid "adjusted," which is winespeak for an addition of acid to compensate for a deficiency.
Wines that don't have enough acidity can taste flabby or flat. Acid additions do not change the aroma of a wine, but can make it taste more tart. Most acids added are natural, such as tartaric or citric.
Tartaric acid, in fact, is the strongest and most common naturally occurring acid in wine grapes. It's responsible for glasslike crystals, or tartrates, that form in some chilled bottles, often just under the cork.
While completely harmless, the crystals taste as tart as the acid they come from. They're often removed in the winemaking process, mostly for visual effect, and some wineries collect and sell them to companies that make cream of tartar, which is used to help cake rise.
A few winemakers also use trace amounts of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in some early-drinking white wines. It acts as an oxygen scavenger, and keeps the wine fresher.
What if a wine is already too tart? Some winemakers add potassium bitartrate, which does the trick.
Consumers love the flavors of vanilla and wood that come from oak barrels.
But new oak barrels are expensive, so winemakers sometimes take a shortcut, adding oak chips or even powder to a wine being made in a cheaper container. The oak is removed before bottling, but that oaky flavor remains.
Wines that have developed hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and thus are termed "reduced," can have a rotten egg smell.
Copper sulfate is a common solution to deal with H2S. The copper reacts with the H2S to eliminate the stink. Copper has its drawbacks because it is also an oxidation catalyst and can shorten the life of a red wine.
But copper can be the consumer's friend. When you get a wine that has a slight hint of that rotten egg smell, drop a penny into the glass and after a minute or two the H2S smell should drop or be wiped out.
Old pennies have more copper than newer ones and work better.
Coloring agents
For years, dark Petite Sirah and Alicante Bouschet were routinely added to pale-colored red wines. However, they add flavors of their own, and even as little as 2 percent can sometimes dominate the taste of a more delicate varietal.
Over the last decade, a number of companies have developed stable color additives, including one introduced in 2001 by Canandaigua Concentrate, a division of the wine company of the same name.
Called MegaNatural, the substance is derived from grape skins and, according to the company, "can be custom-formulated into a wide range of shades of red, including Pink Grapefruit, Strawberry, Cranberry Red, Cherry, and Raspberry, and the variations in between."
Yeast nutrients
Yeast is essential in the winemaking process, as it converts the sugar in the grapes to alcohol. If the yeast dies off before fermentation is complete, the remaining sugar will make the wine sweet, like a dessert wine.
Yeast nutrients -- the most common is diamonium phosphate, a nitrogen source -- contain vitamins and amino acids that keep yeasts healthy so a wine can completely ferment to dryness.
"The best tactic," said Clark Smith, winemaker and president of Vinovation, "is to have healthy fruit come in, and that means grapes picked at moderate sugars. Well-balanced grapes normally contain all the nutrition that a healthy fermentation needs. It's when you get underripe or very ripe fruit that you run into problems."
| Dan Berger is a freelance wine writer in Sonoma County. Originally Published on  ©2004 |
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