South Australia Update – The Kingston Estate Controversy – What Happened, Why it Happened and The Mess it Leaves Behind…

Red without rules is the headline for a full-page inside back cover advertisement in the current issue of The Wine Magazine. It’s promoting a merlot, made by one of Australia’s most energetic and fastest-growing wine brands. Which brand? Kingston Estate. How ironic.

Ironic because Kingston Estate is at the centre of the largest controversy to hit the Australian wine industry since 1988, when Tyrrell’s was found to be using the banned additive sorbitol. Kingston Estate’s export licence was suspended on May 3 by export regulator the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation AWBC over possible breaches of The Australian Food Standards Code concerning illegal and unethical winemaking practices at this winery. The licence will be reinstated subject to conditions that for a period of six months all Kingston Estate’s wines will be tested prior to export and the winery will submit to a systematic auditing programme to ensure it complies with Australian wine laws. Kingston Estate is the country’s twelfth largest producer and ninth biggest wine exporter.

It’s a story that could only have happened in modern times. A couple of American winemaking students to have worked the vintage at Kingston Estate were involved in a protracted but now resolved dispute with the winery over hours and conditions. In what could perhaps best be described as an act of revenge, and a very effective one at that, they sent an e-mail to a subscriber-based newsgroup of viticulture and oenology students and staff at the University of California’s Davis campus headed: ‘Want to work in Australia? A quick warning’.

The e-mail alleges that Kingston Estate uses ‘illegal and unethical winemaking practices’ their words which include the use of silver nitrate and sulphuric acid additions, both of which are presently illegal additives in Australia. Furthermore, they also accuse the winery of adding ethanol to table wines, using liquid red tannin to add colour to red wines and of fermenting sultana juice on red skins from cabernet sauvignon to make red wine. It is illegal to add alcohol to increase the strength of table wines and to add tannin for colour purposes.

Sam Tolley, general manager of the AWBC, says there were ‘enough reasons for the suspension to occur’. The investigation discovered that small quantities of silver nitrate had been added to some wines that had been exported, but at levels well below those acceptable for drinking water. Tolley has since announced that the AWBC will recommend legal proceedings be initiated against Kingston.

Silver nitrate, which can help in the removal of reduced sulphur compounds in wine, has been a permitted additive in Australia in the past and is today permitted in several winemaking countries including New Zealand. As far as the AWBC is concerned, this was the key issue.

Tolley places little importance over the matter of alcohol addition. Adding alcohol to a small degree is a relatively common practice in the making of sweet white wines by stopping fermentations and this aspect is of relatively minor concern to the AWBC.

Interestingly, while sulphuric acid is an illegal additive in Australian wine, hydrogen peroxide and sulphur dioxide are not. Add them simultaneously and what could you get? Sulphuric acid, that’s what.

The AWBC’s investigation inspected the tannin issue but found no evidence to substantiate the claims. It is not illegal to make red wine by fermenting white juice with red skins. This is not uncommon in most winemaking countries. Not to make very good red wine, mind you, but something to sell at the very bottom of the market. Roses and pink sparkling wines have received colour like this for centuries.

It’s interesting that this is even an issue, since as far as the law is concerned, it’s entirely a matter of labelling, which is where the Label Integrity Program steps in and any breaches of its well-established procedures should end up in prosecution. Nobody seems to mind when red grapes are made into white wine as in the case of champagne, for instance, or when ferments of red wines are ‘bled’ of juice to increase the skin to must ratio, fashioning a richer, deeper wine. Wynn’s John Riddoch is made this way, as are most of the world’s best pinot noirs. Yet I don’t hear any complaints about them.

In any case the use of skins in this manner to manufacture a red would only occur for the cheapest of possible wines and are hardly a factor in any wine of any quality pretensions. Just as you get with oak shavings and other winemaking short cuts, if the means creates a product that sells for a price, albeit a low one, the end justifies it.

Let’s look for a moment at some very sobering commercial reality. The biggest export market for Australian wine is the UK, where most wine is sold in supermarkets for around Please login to post comment