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Modern winemaking with its technologies and various additives and substances has reached, during years of progress, a point where the industry giants can produce year in, year out, regardless of batch, nearly identical homogenous wine. Differences between vintages in these products have diminished until they are practically nonexistent. From customer perspective these products are not only affordable but also, due to their homogeneity, very trusted and easy to buy. And unlike in foodstuffs different wine additives haven’t up till now appeared in discussion as they remain invisible to the customer: there is no legislation that would decree the ingredients, additives and substances of alcohol drinks to be marked on the product packaging.
The vicinity of wine production where the use of substances is most voluminous is such where one single tank in a production facility can hold a hundred thousand litres of wine, and there can be dozens of these tanks at the facility. Sometimes a batch like this may be for some reason or other in danger of failing. In that situation, from a risk management viewpoint it is completely reasonable to use additives or substances which can still make the product more easily sellable; or a big batch that was going to be ruined completely can still be saved. There are also additives widely used in the industry that can be used to make, to quote our Product Communications Manager, Master of Wine Taina Vilkuna, “a quite ok wine from lower-quality grapes”. Additives can fix nearly any quality of the wine starting from colour ending in mouthfeel, and the end result most likely is a satisfied customer. On the other hand, using even lower-quality grapes in a product is better than their ending up as waste, when all resource inputs used in production – energy, water, human labour and so forth – will to go waste as well.
