Popular winemakers increase clarity on wine labels

Many American consumers are demanding more clarity with product labels and listed ingredients, especially in the wine and food industry. In fact, according to the Washington Post, many vintners are starting to produce custom labels that offer increased insight into what the consumer is drinking when they uncork a bottle.

The Post uses popular winemaker Bonny Doon as an example. On the back of the company’s 2011 Vin Gris de Cigare, the winery not only lists “Earth” in its address but also provides a complete lists of ingredients, including the grape blend as well as chemicals that may have been used in the winemaking process. This includes tartaric acid, sulfur dioxide, yeast and bentonite.

Although many wine labels will reveal the grape blends, most do not provide the clarity into ingredients used during the winemaking process like Bonny Doon has.

“What customers don’t get is that the style of a wine, especially in the New World, can largely be driven by fairly intrusive stylistic practices: the use of oak chips, enzymes, selected yeasts, etc.,” Randall Grahm, the founder of Bonny Doon, told the Washington Post in an email. “As a consumer, I really do want to know if the depth of color is something that comes from the grapes nominally represented on the label or from Mega-Purple [a color additive used in red wines].”

As more Americans drink wine, “cheap wine” has increased in quality. But, these improvements have mostly come from chemicals in a laboratory rather than through “viticulture,” according to the Post. In response to this industry shift, many vintners – Bonny Doon included – have converted their vineyards into biodynamic viticulture farms – an intense form of organic farming.

If wine retailers or independent vintners wish to inform consumers as to what ingredients they may have included in the winemaking process or of their wines they sell, they may want to invest in a color label printer to create these custom labels.