A Fine Vintage for Red Tape

I thought the hard part was going to be making the wine’, bemoans a new entrant to Australian wine production. ‘Then I have to package it, then sell it, but before I can do either, I have to cut through all the red tape.’

Lucky he’s Australian. Lucky the Australian government doesn’t take a hands-on role in wine regulation, as European governments have done readily for centuries. But he does have a point. There are still plenty of people in Australia whose job is to tell the wine maker and marketer what they may or may not do. The most obvious cases relate to wine labels…

Whichever way you look at it, every cynical Australian would dip the lid to the brilliant negotiating prowess of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation. In a deal which more resembles an old-fashioned rout than a true bargaining process, the Australian wine industry has begun to rid itself of the most worthless of its generic name terms in turn for a multitude of concessions from the EEC which have not only prised open the door to that most lucrative market but have put out the welcome mat as well.

Our accomplished negotiators have managed to put a hold on the issue of removing the names that really grieve and should go – like Champagne, Chablis, Burgundy, Graves, Port, Sauternes and Sherry – to an unspecified future date which will take into account their ‘commercial significance’ back here in good old Oz. Furthermore, we can hang onto ‘Hermitage’, ‘Lambrusco’ and ‘Riesling’ as a generic name as long as we want to for home use! Personally, I’d rather see them go as well.

In a gesture which looks more like Marie-Antoinette’s famous concession of ‘Let them eat cake’ the closer you look at it, by the close of last year we surrendered such crucial names as Beaujolais which the courts had already done for us, Cava, Frascati, Sancerre, St Emilion, Vinho Verde and White Bordeaux. And by the end of 1997 we will need to have determined how we are to survive without such nomenclature as Chianti, Frontignan, Hock, Madeira and Malaga. Who were these AWBP people, what are their telephone numbers, and what they will charge to talk on my behalf next time I end up in trouble?

As part of the agreement between the EEC and the AWBP, Australia has marginally tightened its own regulations concerning the labelling of varieties and regions to comply with the EEC’s own standards. No longer can a wine be 80 chardonnay to be called ‘Chardonnay’ on the label. It must now be 85 chardonnay, which for my mind still permits 15 too much doradillo. Similarly, 85 of the wine must now be from the single region claimed and from the single vintage.

If we have indeed made a concession which will require some work to implement and supervise, it is that our geographical label listings must now be defined and registered with the EC. Now the AWBP’s new Geographical Indications Committee will finally have to determine what is Coonawarra and what is not, for instance, as indeed it will for all new areas under development.

It could be suggested that the burgeoning use of grape juice concentrate tosses a spanner into the neatly packaged sets of wine rules. It’s undeniable that there is legalised ‘chapitalisation’ in Australia – although we follow the German model of permitting ‘sweet reserve’ of wine juice in addition to concentrate before, during or after the fermentation ahead of the French practice of enabling cane sugar to be added to juice or fermenting must.

How much concentrate can you add without putting the varietal or regional percentages at risk? Grape concentrate is around a four-fold concentration of grape juice. To increase the sweetness of juice from 11o Baume to 13o Baume, for instance, you need to add one unit of concentrate to 13.5 units of juice, a concentrate addition of 7.4 by volume.

In itself, this percentage should not be enough to alter a wine’s regional or varietal make-up. Alan Russel, who administers the industry’s Label Integrity Programme LIP, says that some uses of concentrate may push the percentages close to or just over the limit, but is prepared to take some factors into account. For example, a yeast inoculum for a chardonnay fermentation prepared in last year’s gordo concentrate may actually blow the 5 vintage variation, or else a computer may inform the horrified winemaker that his trophy-winning varietal is only 83 chardonnay.

For this reason, Russel says the new blending regulations allow the exclusion of inoculum for fermentation and should not push a wine from claiming origin or variety.

One of the major uses of concentrate is to make slightly or semi-sweet wine. It’s just too risky to leave slightly sweet wine in tanks for extended periods, so winemakers dose up these wines – even if like many rieslings they require just a brief shot of sugar – with juice or concentrate just prior to bottling.

So which is better to add, straight sugar or grape concentrate? In strictly winemaking terms, there is little difference. You add it with a glug, rather than a splash. Although some genuinely varietal-flavoured concentrate has been available for short periods in the past, produced by an adapted reverse osmosis process, most concentrate is created through boiling juice at low temperatures under a vacuum. These concentrates are clean, but not varietal, with a neutral, slightly honeyed flavour. Winemakers agree that when made from neutral varieties such as sultana, doradillo or pedro, concentrate is just like adding a sugar and water solution to wine and has no taste in the finished wine. It’s worth adding right away that there’s no way a wine is going to be any good if it relies excessively on concentrate.

Commercially, the industry at large does not want to add chapitalisation with refined sugar into its food industry standards. Moves to legalise chapitalisation in recent years have been foiled by the majority of wine producers from warmer areas, who use the argument that Australian wine is ‘pure, controlled and not contrived’. In reality, that’s perfectly valid, since Australia’s international reputation hinges on the purity of its wine, the least adulterated in the world.

The document that informs Australian winemakers what they may and may not do to commercial wine is known as the Standard P4, itself part of the Australian Food Standards Code. Each state has a P4 of its own, which the National Food Authority endeavours to keep consistent and up to date.

The P4, for example, informs the budding oenologist it is perfectly legal to add evaporated milk, sawdust and shavings of oakwood to wine, while reduced alcohol wine is not allowed to be labelled as port or sherry. No wine can contain more than 200 mg/l of sorbic acid or 1.5 g/l of volatility, while meat or beef wine must contain at least 20 g/l of protein. Many of the world’s best late-harvest dessert wines including some of our own probably exceed this volatility limit. Perhaps certain wine writers could one day cop a P4 code violation for describing non-beef shiraz or pinot as ‘meaty’?

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