Wine 101: Sulfites

[smallworld]

I'm surprised no one has made the obvious connection that the "Contains Sulfites" label that exists only in the United States, the most litigious society in this galaxy and the fact that no other country feels the need to place this phrase on their labels.

Unfortunately, that's not true- "sulfite-free" wines are all the rage in Japan. The Japan Times carried this article last month, with a follow-up this month.

I have a student who visits France frequently and swears the wine there is better than the French wine in Japan. This is because, she says, the wineries fill all their wines meant for export with preservatives, and keep the "natural" stuff for themselves. She says French wine in France is very "fresh".

I assume many Japanese wine consumers have the same ideas as her. My hope is that the market will change to meet these mis-informed people, thus bringing down the price of the good stuff!

Edited September 22, 2004 by smallworld (log)

[Rebel Rose]

Thank you, smallworld! That's one of the best articles on sulfites I've ever read. I encourage everyone interested in the subject to check it out.

[ojbowl]

Red wines are macerated and fermented "on their skins" to extract color, flavor and tannin from the pigment-rich skins.  Young wines with fresh tannins can taste very astringent.  Compare it to eating a whole bunch of red table grapes—in spite of the wonderful juice inside, grape skins and seeds will leave a dry, abraded feeling on your tongue.  People who are sensitive to products like nuts, tea leaves, and cinnamon bark will often be sensitive to the woody component of tannin as well, which can result in headaches and stuffy noses.

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I am all new to wine and am not even old enogh to legally drink it :::shreek, downer::::

But when you say macerated and fermented; I take it that they soke them, or do some process such as brineing like they would do with some sorts of meat and vegetables, and agitate them to fasten the softening/ripening process as well as clean the sulfite residue from the fresh grapes. My thought however is, this soaking also promotes the aforementioned marriage of sulfites. what if they simply rinsed the grapes and then sun dried them. thus, reducing the whole sulfite matter, but then probably increasing the ageing/tanning process. which bring up more a completely different problem :::someone please stop my (i know i am rediculous) imagination::: consequently i have just confused myself.

I have asked a few bartenders that i know, but they only pour it... how unfulfilling their jobs must be? it actually angers me--- This is their profession and they know nothing about anything.

Hopefully i am not to late for some more participation on this frustrating yet intreguing topic

[Rebel Rose]

Where to start, so many questions . . .

Wine is basically fermented juice. Nothing is added except yeast. (And perhaps some yeast nutrient, which is basically a B vitamin made from yeast hulls.)

By macerate, I mean the skins of the grapes are broken, sometimes just barely, in order to release the juice. We don't soak the grapes in anything but their own juice, and then just long enough for that light-colored juice to soak some of the color and flavor out of the skins. Then we squeeze everything together tightly, letting the juice and color run into a pan, and we throw away the squeezed-out skins.

Washing the grapes would be pretty cool, but we can't let them dry in the sun because they are very sweet and the wet grapes will get moldy and buggy. Also, drying them would raisin them up, making them unfit for wine. We need them to be juicy.

There are "washing tunnels" for grapes that blast a small stream of water into the grapes and then dry them with blasted air. But the machines, which come with sorting belts, etc., cost around $100,000. I think. They blast off all the dirt and earwigs.

Tannin and sulfites in wine are actually a good thing. They naturally preserve the wine. Some people are sensitive to tannin or sulfites, but those people would also be highly allergic to other foods, as well.

Here's a link to how wine is made at howstuffworks.com.

[Foodie in Vancouver]

I am one of those people who seems to end up with a stuffy nose when I drink wine. As I happen to love the stuff, I simply take an extra antihistamine and intranasal steroids (Flonase) whenever I have wine. It makes the stuffy nose less of a problem which is important because so much of the pleasure from wine is due to the wonderful aromas. But I would love to think there are other ways of conquering the problem - but if it is an allergy to tannins that is the cause then I am doing the most appropriate thing. Nice to finally find out that I stumbled on the right approach.

[Rebel Rose]

An article this week on sulfites at Newsday.com: Little risk in wine's sulfites

So-called "red wine headaches" are not caused by sulfites, according to Andrew L. Waterhouse, professor of enology at the University of California at Davis. His Web site contains, among other wine-related topics, a good discussion of the sulfites issue: http://waterhouse.ucdavis .edu/winecomp/so2.htm.

Sulfites also are used to preserve fruit-based foods, many of which contain higher sulfite concentrations than wine's 20 to 30 ppm: Dried fruits weigh in at more than 100 ppm; grape juice and wine vinegar, at 50 to 99 ppm; and pickles and mushrooms, at 10 to 49 ppm.

[carswell]

Hoping y'all will indulge me the self-reference, here's an extract from a post I made a while back to a thread on Quebec's "dépanneur" (convenience store) wines over on the Montreal, Quebec and Eastern Canada board. I've bolded a point that, assuming I haven't missed anything, hasn't been clearly made in this discussion.

>"I can find many bottles of wine in a good Ontario liquor store that are $7 and less (GST ncluded) that are better than the depaneur junk and you get less of that sulfur headache."

You mean sulphite headache, no? In any case, you're wrong — not about the headache one gets from those wines but that sulphur/sulphites is/are the cause. Sulphite headaches are an urban legend and there's a PHD thesis in there if someone wants to track the development of it. Certainly some of it has to do with the U.S. decision — prompted by the CSPI and other neo-prohibiltionist groups — to require the "contains sulfites" label on all wines, ostensibly to warn people with allergies to sulphites to avoid these products. Curiously, that warning isn't required on other products that have much higher levels of sulphites (fast-food french fries, much supermarket bread, many salad bars, etc.). Also, sulphites are a natural by-product of winemaking and have been around for centuries. They are found on grapes. Before filling, barrels are often sanitized using a sulphur compound (in olden days, a sulphur wick was burned inside them; these days they may be rinsed with potassium metabisulphite). And, anyway, sulphite sensitivity doesn't usually manifest itself as a headache but rather in the form of asthma-like symptoms or, in extreme cases, anaphylactic shock. All of which is to say that the sulphite scare is, above all, a political tactic designed to turn people away from alcohol.

Wine headaches are usually attributable to dehydration and a histamine reaction to components in the wine (and god knows what components are in dep wines). People who get migraines from all red or rosé wine are often allergic to anthocyanin, the pigments in the grape skins.

[Rebel Rose]

I just remembered one point that I don't think we've covered yet . . .

Sulphites occur naturally in the winemaking process, and therefore, no wine is completely free of sulphites. Under EU regulations, a wine is declared "sulphite free" if it has less than 10 mg per liter. A phrase commonly seen on US organic/natural wines is No Added Sulphites, which many people mistakenly assume to mean None. At. All.

From the UK Independent Online:

* Some organic wines will be lower in sulphites, and some will call themselves "sulphite-free", although sulphites occur naturally in wine. To be "sulphite-free" under EU regulations, a wine must contain less than 10mg per litre. In practice, few people suffer a reaction to less than 20mg of sulphites. The maximum permitted level is 200mg per litre.

The above article is a very interesting and detailed piece on asthmatic reactions to foods, including wine. If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend taking a look at it.