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What You Need To Know About Wine Additives

Did you know that there are a lot of wine additives used to make wine?

Most wine additives are safe, however, there have been a few notoriously famous cases of unsafe wine additives in the past. Let’s get into the nitty gritty truth about wine additives and dispel some common wine additive myths.

Worst Case Scenario: A Wine Scandal!

In 1985, German wine quality control scientists discovered the presence of a commercial solvent, diethylene glycol, in some of their low-end wines. Diethylene glycol is a sweet-tasting toxic chemical sometimes used in anti-freeze. After the scientists discovered the chemical, they soon realized that the German producers were illegally blending Austrian wines with theirs.

While there were no reported casualties and the wines were pulled from the market, the media scare caused a long-term fear in consumers over wine additives.

Don’t worry, wine additives are now more closely regulated and the national electronic archives maintains a list of chemicals that are legally allowed for use in wine.

Common Wine Additives

Food products such as beer, juice and wine are unstable. Because of their volatile nature, processes have been developed to stabilize food products such as homogenizing juice. In the wine world there are many different wine additives, some of which have been used for hundreds of years with no ill effects.

The intention of these additives is not to adulterate the wine, but to stabilize it. Wines have the potential to last longer when they are stable. Many of these aren’t really additives at all, instead they glom (with molecular attraction) onto unwanted particles and are removed from the finished wine.