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Given the long history of sulfite additions to wine and many other food products, where did the health warning come from? Approximately 0.25 percent of North Americans have serious sulfite allergies, including one unfortunate man who is reported to have died after eating at a salad bar where the salad was sprayed with a 2000 ppm "keep fresh" sulfite solution that was commonly used in the 1970s (remember, bottled wine typically contains 100 times less than this amount).

	Industrial sulfites from French wine supplier Chaumat Chimie

While the Food and Drug Agency (FDA) was pondering sulfite-labeling requirements, fanatical anti-alcohol activists saw this as a golden opportunity to associate wine consumption with a health scare. They were able to successfully pressure the FDA into requiring a prominent "Contains Sulfites" warning on every bottle of wine made or imported into the United States after 1986. (Oddly, the fact that raisins, soy sauce, pickles, fruit juices and many other foods can contain as much as ten times more sulfites than wine didn't seem to bother the temperance lobby.)

Despite the fact that virtually every winemaker in the world uses sulfites, the sudden appearance of the warning on United States wine labels led to the mistaken belief that U.S. wines had "extra chemicals." (Australia requires a small "Preservative (220) Added" note on the label; the EU requires no labeling.)

The wine trade abounds with stories of customers who claim that "the sulfites in U.S. wines give me headaches that I never get with European wines." Some wealthy, but certainly not well-educated, customers even claim to buy Bordeaux in Europe and then have it hand carried back into the U.S. since "everyone knows that the Bordeaux imported to the U.S. has sulfites added to it that they don't use in Europe."

It is well-known that some people do experience headaches from drinking even small amounts of red wine, although the exact cause is unknown. What is certainly true is that white wines are bottled with substantially higher sulfite levels than reds, because they lack the tannins and color compounds of red wines. Whites need more antioxidant "help" to survive in the bottle.

Therefore anyone who can drink white wines (or eat dried fruit for that matter) but who claims that the sulfites in red wines give them headaches is propagating a falsehood. Interestingly, some winemakers and Japanese importers have jumped on this bandwagon and are trying to position so-called "no sulfite" wines as the latest return-to-traditional-winemaking ploy (if by "traditional" they mean pre-Roman, then I guess I might grant them the point). Of course, since yeasts produce sulfites naturally during fermentation, there is no such thing as a "sulfite-free" wine. The FDA does, however, allow wines with final concentrations of less than 10 ppm to drop the "Contains Sulfites" label. In this case, many winemakers include a "No Added Sulfites" designation, which leads many people to falsely conclude that the wine contains no sulfites at all.

Could centuries of traditional winemaking practice really be wrong? Or could the new wave of "no added sulfite" wines possibly represent some new leap forward in technology? We recently attended two technical tastings to see for ourselves under carefully controlled double-blind conditions where the participants are not told what the test is going to be. We tasted sulfured and unsulfured versions of the same wines made by two Italian winemakers who were honest enough to bottle them separately and let people judge for themselves.

The three pairs of white wines tasted were the 2002 and 2003 Sassaia from Angiolino Maule and the 2000 Oslavje from Radikon (regular and "no added sulfite" versions of each). The differences were dramatic: In all three cases what were later revealed to be the unsulfured versions were substantially browner in color and smelled distinctly of sherry and cooked green beans. And while the regular versions were bright and fresh in the mouth, the "no added sulfite" versions tasted of caramelized sherry and were noticeably more brutish and astringent.

Sometimes one really needs to work hard to detect differences between two similar-tasting wines, but this certainly wasn't the case this time. All tasting panel members described the unsulfured wines as either slightly or well past their peak, and one blind-taster speculated that the unsulfured wines had been stored in a car trunk all summer, while another guessed that the 2002 Sassaia pair was actually the same wine from two vintages that were a decade apart.

While one taster said that her company would keep importing unsulfured wines to Japan "to meet market demand," there was no doubt which version everyone in the room would prefer to be drinking at home.

Regular and "no sulfur dioxide" versions of the above wines can be purchased (in Japan) at www.rakuten.co.jp

Originally Published on The Japan Times ©2004