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While researching this article, I had a flashback to an encounter with a customer that took place several years ago. A woman looking for a cold white wine was dismayed at how few chilled wines we had under $10, and she was quite vocal about it. "I can get GREAT wine for under $10!" she emphatically said. "Lady," I said to myself, "you’ve never had a great wine. Either that or you have a lousy sense of taste. Perhaps both!" (What a wonderful word - lousy. It obviously derives from "infested with lice," but it has come to mean "mean," "contemptible," or, as in this case, "wretchedly bad.") Of course I didn’t say that. I merely said that there are many pleasant wines for $10 or less, but that truly great wine was always much more expensive. She ended up with a $9.99 wine, but she wasn’t happy, and I haven’t seen her since. I’ve been thinking about the selection of wines that we carry at Beekmans and the selection that customers see at other outlets, particularly supermarkets and big box stores. I’m sure those places have many, many wines under $10. We have a few. Ours are, for the most part, wines that I think are pretty good (a precious few are very good), and I could enjoy them in a social setting even if they aren’t the wines I want to drink on a regular basis. Call me an elitist or a snob, but I drink wine because I enjoy the taste, enjoy experiencing and learning about the different types, and enjoy the synergy between food and wine that makes dining much more pleasurable; in addition, a vital part of the experience for me is the opportunity to share interesting wine and the whole gestalt with others who are also appreciative. The inexpensive wines that we carry are $8 - $10 per bottle. Much less expensive ones exist, but I have never (NEVER!) tasted a $6 or $7 (or less!) wine in today’s dollar that I would want to drink. Why bother? Vodka is cheaper if you want alcohol, and it can be doctored in numerous socially acceptable ways that would only be embarrassing if used to cover up the taste of cheap wine. Two Buck Chuck? Drinkable if you’re desperate, but I’d really rather drink water. Cheap wines have two general problems that are not mutually exclusive. Most low-priced wines are mass produced and devoid of character and flavor due to excessive yields. The best wines come from vineyards that yield less than four tons of grapes per acre. Very good wines can can come from vineyards yielding five to even seven tons per acre. But the yield for cheap wines is invariably ten or more tons per acre. This produces diluted, weakly flavored wines. And it may not be legal, but a dirty little secret in the industry is that many wines are made less expensive by dilution with water. Second, many cheap wine actually taste cheap because they are flawed. Sometimes it’s because the grapes are grown in poor, often hot locations incapable of producing good quality. Sometimes it’s because of poor techniques or poor hygiene in the vineyard or the winery. When things go wrong, the wine is often sold off at a distressed price. Manipulation in the winery can partly conceal some of the flaws, but most show through to an experienced taster. We now move to the heart of this article: what do the producers of flawed or diluted (naturally or not) wine do to make their wines palatable. As with hot dogs, you may not want to know. Tricks of the Trade The second well-known trick is to add oak flavoring to a diluted or flawed wine. This is usually done by throwing oak chips or racks of oak wood into a large tank of wine. None of the slow oxidation benefits of oak barrels are conferred to the wine - nor is the cost in labor and materials - but the vanillin and related flavors from the wood can partially hide flaws or give a wimpy wine at least some flavor. This is one reason that so many cheap wines taste similar. A less well-known method is the subject of the remainder of this article. Have you ever heard of Mega-Purple? Neither had I until recently. What is Mega-Purple? It is a grape concentrate most likely made by vacuum distillation, fractional distillation, or solvent extraction techniques. It is made from deeply pigmented grapes, and it is very sweet. It is the best known of a series of concentrates marketed as kosher food additives with names such as Mega- Cherry Shade Grape Juice Concentrate, Mega- Purple Grape Juice Concentrate, and Mega Red Grape Juice Concentrate. Mega-Purple is made by Constellation Brands (a huge conglomerate that owns or imports Arbor Mist, Blackstone, Black Box, Clos du Bois, Corona, Estancia, Franciscan, Hardys, Hogue, Kim Crawford, Manischwitz, Monkey Bay, Mount Veeder Winery, Mouton Cadet, Negra Modelo, Nobilo, Pacifico, Paul Masson, Ravenswood, Rex Goliath, Rioja Vega, Robert Mondavi, Ruffino, Schenley, Simi, St. Pauli Girl, Svedka Taylor, Tsingtao, Vendange, and Woodbridge among other brands). What does the addition of Mega-Purple do to a cheap red wine? Briefly, it gives the wine more color (the public incorrectly associates more color with more and better flavor), softens it (because of the extra sugar), hides some of its flaws, and gives it more flavor (although the particular flavor is not one associated with fine wine). Who uses it? Very few wineries admit to using it, but some industry observers believe that the majority of California wines selling below $20 per bottle use Mega-Purple or something similar! More details from Dan Berger Apparently, thousands of wine-makers around the world have answered this not-very-theoretical question in the affirmative. In interviews with a dozen winemakers and wine company executives, I learned that such a substance does indeed exist. Sounding much like a magical potion that improves many wines into which it is blended, Mega-Purple (and similar products) are thick concentrates derived from Teinturer grapes [varietals that have color in the pulp as well as the skin] that are aimed strictly at filling gaps in red wines that have color and/or flavor deficiencies, a procedure that otherwise might be accomplished by blending in a darker wine. Assume you have a Syrah that finished fermentation with a paler color than you believe to be desirable. (Assume the wine is aimed at the $30 price range and its color suggests it is lacking in flavor.) In the past, winemakers would add some Petite Sirah or Alicante Bouschet to plump up the color. Now, instead of having to buy a small amount of such wine from the bulk market, wineries are resorting to Mega-Purple, which sells for about $135 a gallon. That sounds expensive, but the substance is highly concentrated, and a little goes a long way. [At concentrations typically used, that gallon is enough for 250 to 500 bottles - 25 to 50 cents per bottle.] If you haven't heard much about Mega-Purple, there's a good reason. It flies below the radar intentionally; winemakers are reluctant to discuss their use of it. If you haven't heard much about Mega-Purple, there's a good reason. It flies below the radar intentionally; winemakers are reluctant to discuss its use. Indeed, many winemakers feign surprise that it even exists. The reasons they seem reluctant to mention it are many. A couple of them said, confidentially, that to admit using such an additive implies that their grapes are less than superior. Only deficient wines would need an additive like Mega-Purple.Two other winemakers admitted that they rely on Mega-Purple only for those wines that are weak in one area or another and that they use only tiny amounts, but there are winery owners who are fearful of revealing that such a substance ever crossed their wineries' thresholds. Yet one Monterey County winery president confided, "Virtually everyone is using it. In just about every wine up to $20 a bottle anyway, but maybe not as much over that."A longtime Sonoma County winemaker said, "Sure, I use it, but very infrequently and only for some of my (lower-priced) wines. Look, Mega-Purple has residual [sugar], so it adds a bit of texture, and that adds a little weight, and it pops the fruit." He said he uses no more than .06% of the final product. "More than that, and you run the risk of getting overripe characteristics." The Monterey County winery executive said, "You don't want to go above .2%, so you're below the sweetness threshold." He said his winemaker knows that" when you get it up to .3%, .35%, you're going to smell it. And at .45%, (the wine) comes out really sweet." Mega-Purple is produced by Constellation Brands and sold by third-party vendors. It is made by concentrating the Teinturer grape Rubired, a cross between Alicante Ganzin and Tinta Cão. As such, say winemakers who use it, the concentrate has a distinctive aroma that smells a bit like what they called "Central Valley red" [what I call "that cheap smell and taste"] with hints of a foxy sort, not unlike a native American grape. Napa Valley winemaker Scott Harvey was fascinated by Mega-Purple. In an interview he said: "I don't use it, but any winery you talk to will say they don't. One reason I don't like it is it has a distinctive flavor to it that I think is identifiable. So you can see what's wrong with using it. If everybody uses it, they're adding the same flavor." Harvey said that if Napa Valley Cabernets are being criticized for having an overripe character, "I suspect part of that is Mega-Purple, sort of a jammy taste, but with no fruit to it. It has a kind of richness, a kind of weight to it, and it's kind of, like, syrupy--that flavor you get from some (hot climate) Alicante Bouschet." Winemaker Clark Smith, founder of Vinovation, a wine analysis and consulting firm in Sebastopol, Calif., said, "Sure, I'll admit to using it. It touches up color, and I think when it's overused, it makes the argument that's in [the movie] 'Mondovino,' that it covers up regional character." Smith uses Mega-Purple only for wines that are truly deficient in some aspect that the concentrate would fix, but because it has 68% sugar, he believes it is best added before fermentation so the sugar ferments out. "Mega-Purple has a way of homogenizing flavors and aromas," he said. "And that's a danger. It makes wines very similar to one another. You don't want the book you read this week to be the same as the book you read last week, do you? So shouldn't wines offer different characteristics too?" Smith once made a Pinot Noir that was very light in color, but it had an attractive perfumed aroma and loads of minerality, "nothing like an American Pinot. And there was a lot of pressure to make it fleshier and darker, more acceptable to the expectation of California Pinot. So we used a little Mega-Purple, and when we got to the point at which it got in the way of the flavor profile of the wine, we backed off. The key question there was, do you want it big and stupid, or do you want to see the richness of the wine? You just shouldn't use too much of it." To test what Mega-Purple does to wines, I asked Napa Valley winemaker Scott Harvey to stage a blind tasting of two of his wines that had been "adjusted" with Mega-Purple and another red additive. Harvey added large amounts to his 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel, ranging from .2% to .8%, four levels for Mega-Purple and four for Ultra Red. He then put two control glasses in among the 10 glasses, and a panel of judges ranked the wines. The tasters included John Buechsenstein, winemaker and UC Davis instructor in sensory evaluation; winemaker Kerry Damskey; Harvey; Clark Smith; and Dr. Richard Peterson, former winemaker at Beaulieu and long a fixture in the California winemaking scene. The "additive" wines were clearly plumper and a bit more full-bodied than were the control samples in both cases, and they seemed to work best in the Cabernet Sauvignon. The Cabernet in this case wasn’t very dark in color, so the additive wines bolstered the red color. But even at the lowest levels, I found the wines to be a bit fatter and less characteristic of Cabernet. For me, the Zinfandels were most hurt by the Mega-Purple because it compromised the varietal spice. Most of the comments from the tasters were interesting, noting that they could see how a winemaker would choose to use an additive to improve the color of a color-deficient wine, but all said that the use of such elements is very tricky. Damskey said he has used Mega-Purple a couple of times, "but the addition has to be a lot less" than we used in our blind tasting. "And you have to be very careful. The downside is that it mutes the aroma." Peterson said he could see how a wine might be improved a bit if Mega-Purple were added, notably a wine without much flavor development. He actually liked a few of the additions he tasted. "I liked the softening effect that the sugar adds," he said. Harvey pointed out that in some of the wines with the additive, "the ‘sweetness’ in the Cabernet made the tannins more astringent," because, he said, the sweetness was out of sync with the rest of the wine. He also got a licorice or jug character from them. "There’s no question that Mega-Purple adds a fruit component all its own," Smith said. "If you can do it transparently, then fine. But winemakers should ask the question, ‘Are all my wines aimed at the same thing? Do I want them to taste pretty much like each other?’ If not, then they should be very careful about using it." "In my trials," Damskey said, "high levels such as these didn’t work at all. Even in lower-level red wines, there is a jammy, overripe component. And despite the fact that there’s more sugar there, you tend to lose that delicate ‘sweetness’ that grapes give you. At lower levels, I think the sweetness brings something to the table." He said the downside to using Mega-Purple is that the wine loses some aromatics, and the varietal nature is a bit compromised. He said he would never go over .1%, and more likely would use it at levels of .06% or less. Smith said, "I think it’s ridiculous to add residual sugar to red wine. And Mega-Purple seems to give the wine a jugy, tooty-fruity aroma. And it changes the texture. I didn’t like the parching quality of the tannins. And it also seems to cover some of the terpenes and thiols that are attractive in wines." Buechsenstein agreed that the additions changed the mouth feel of the wines, softening in one way but making the tannins seem awkward and out of place. John Williams of Frog’s Leap used it only once. He dislikes "all the crutches that winemakers have come to rely upon, instead of working on what they should be working on--which is not irrigating the vines." Williams’ concern, he said, is that color additions like Mega-Purple might someday "become part of the regular winemaking regime."
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