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This seems to be conflating a number of different things.

1. What you call industrial yeast are simply isolated yeast strains used because of their favorable characteristics like quick fermentation or the creation of secondary flavors and aroma's. The alternative is spontaneous fermentation by whatever is already on the grapes or in the barrels, in which case you're going to have a bunch of different kinds of yeast and the end product is less predictable. But isolated strains of yeast and wild yeast are all just yeast. In beer brewing, almost all yeast comes from isolated strains, except for some unique sour styles like Belgian Lambic. Picking the right yeast for a particular kind of grape or a particular kind of wort is an art form and there is nothing industrial about it. We could call wheat "industrialized grass", but is that really more informative?

2. Oak flakes are sometimes added to fake oak cask maturing, but really only in cheap wine, and ultimately you have to ask yourself: do I enjoy the flavor or not? Barrels certainly have that warm fuzzy "authentic" and "artisanal" thing going for them, but using flakes, extracts and what-not can often be used to make a product that's almost as good at a fraction of the price, and that's great because it means more people get to enjoy good wine (maybe not great, but good and predictable, e.g. Jacob's Creek). Adding actual fruit flavorings is very rare and generally not allowed in the EU.

3. The list of 60 approved ingredients contains mostly preservatives like sulfites, without which it is very hard to keep the wine stable (I enjoy natural wines very much but every bottle is different), or finings like isinglass, gelatine or egg white to get the yeast and other particles to drop out of the wine and of which trace amounts might make it to the bottle.

Buy what you like, don't let your purchasing decisions be influenced by FUD.

I think you misunderstood some of OP's points.

For 1) the problem is not that the companies use industrial yeast, but that they take already perfectly good wine, and "reyeast" it to fake how and where it was made.

For 2) as well, surely people are allowed to enjoy wine made with oak flakes, but the producers should be honest about it.

More transparency and labels such as the suggested "wine drink" can only help consumers.

1. Isn't "reyeast"ing only going to work if there's still significant sugar content in the must? If so, then it's just like any other wine company importing/sourcing their fruit, and then adding their yeast in-house. This is VERY common practice. I vint in central california, and if a bottle of wine doesn't explicitly say "estate" on the bottle, they're sourcing their grapes from somewhere off-site (usually still in the same region, but not always. as the label gets larger, the chances increase that you're going out of the region).

2.Oak flakes vs barrels is very obvious if you know what to look for. The rounding out of flavors via microoxygenation is apparent on a bottle that's seen barrel time.

This study was for beginning wine students. Of course they're going to try to pass the test with the information that had just been provided them (red==this, white==that).

Is there a distinction between grapes, must and wine? As ingredients we could treat all of them as synonyms, but it seems unhelpful. Parent post said "perfectly good wine", which I have a hard time imagine would be regular must that is being sold as wine.

Could it be that the producer take cheap wine and add additional sugar and yeast?

Must is grape juice (sometimes still mixed in with the peels) before or at the start of fermentation, just as wort is malty sugary water but becomes beer when yeast is added and fermentation begins. At the end of fermentation very little sugar remains, so these are definitely not interchangeable liquids. These terms have a legal definition in most places, because wine and beer is taxed heavily but grape juice is not.

(1) would make zero economic sense because you're adding an extra step to the process when you could just instruct the winemaker from which you import to do things the way you like, and as bathMarm0t notes it would require the addition of sugar or fruit juice so the yeast has something to work with, in which case you definitely cannot legally call it wine anymore.

(2) It might be out there, but I've never seen cheap wine advertising that it's been put in this or that kind of barrel for a particular amount of time. At most, they might put a barrel on the label to evoke the idea, which is fairly innocuous as far as false advertising goes.

If your interpretation of the OP is closer to what he meant, then really what you both are talking about is fraud, not common practice nor legal and definitely not likely to be true of the majority of "generic wine from our national alcohol store".

I also watched this documentary. They add sugar not once but twice in the process. It is very economical since they can adapt to many different tastes so everyone can find something they like. But I have never found a wine I like, mabe this is why? A friends friend (and so on) buys something from a traditional wine yard that is drinkable but still not good... :)

And those waiting for legislation for ingredients on wine bottles might have to wait for a while more. It has been in the works for 35 years. The industry really dont want to dispell our beliefs in the traditional wine barrel.

> they take already perfectly good wine, and "reyeast" it to fake how and where it was made.

Is there really any evidence to suggest that is going on? It doesn't make a ton of sense as an (admittedly amateur) wine and beermaker. I mean, I suppose adding more yeast is possible, but it seems like it would work... very poorly, especially into finished wine. You'd have to use a much more alcohol-tolerant strain than the original fermentation, but not if the original wine contained sulfites (which stop fermentation -- that's the major reason why they're added)... It doesn't seem to make a ton of sense.

Rather, I think what is perhaps going on is a misunderstanding, or even a sort of mendaciously inaccurate description, of how modern winemaking works, where you -- just like beermaking has for centuries -- put in (aka: "pitch") yeast, selected to be consistent with the type and style of wine you want to make. The alternative would be to make the winemaker depend only on the randomly-occurring yeast in an area. (Which I suppose is a sort of 'terroir', but it's not the sort I think most people would appreciate.)

Look in this thread for my link to the documentary but it's in Swedish so it might not do any good. Also probably geo blocked.

But I want to reply by saying that the evidence was provided mostly by one of the 10 wine distributors that the journalists requested the content declaration from. They asked the 10 largest distributors sold in Swedish alcohol stores and one replied.

Through that information they were able to track down the company that sells the flavored yeast and make the connection from the flavors listed in their marketing all the way to the actual wine on the shelf in the store.

The other distributors refused multiple times to give out any information and some said they would gladly await the EU regulations about content declaration that are in the works, and would follow them, but still refused to say anything about the content.

It was actually 63 substances allowed by the EU, I just found out now while re-reading the article.

Unfortunately the article and documentary are both in Swedish. [1]

About the yeast, I'm a layman so I don't know what industrial yeast is but this was the term used by the journalist.

The report showed that a company dedicated to producing and selling flavored yeasts were marketing specific yeasts with flavors. And these flavors then turned up in the liqour store on the wine where the yeast was used. So the yeast was used as direct flavoring.

My point is that it's processed wine and this isn't clear to the consumer. Maybe it should have been when we suddenly were flooded with so many different types of cheap wines but I was too young at that time.

Before the 60s wine was not as available as it is today in sweden, or as cheap.

So clearly processing wine has become a way to make more money and that's when I get concerned.

But as you say, drink what you want. I've made the choice to stop drinking processed wine. And I'll gladly await the EU decision on whether or not wine distributors will have to declare contents.

1. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/granskning/ug/vill-inte-uppge-vad...

Ultimately, wine is processed by definition - unprocessed wine is grape juice. But like you, I think less manipulated is better, otherwise you end up with boring but pleasant homogenous tasting wine. The now defunct In Pursuit of Balance really pushed this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/the-wrath-of-gra...

Technically, wouldn't natural wine be processed grape juice? Processed wine would be cheap wine that get enhanced by an additional process like added ingredients or heat/pressure.

Some versions of Protestantism in fact use grape juice for communion under the argument that the wine that Jesus was said to have made was "new wine" and thus unfermented. Which makes one wonder why the miracle wasn't told as turning water into juice.

>And these flavors then turned up in the liqour store on the wine where the yeast was used. So the yeast was used as direct flavoring.

Same as in beer: the particular yeast strains are highly influential in the taste of the final product. I don't really see why you cast this as an adulteration, or a deceptive processing.

With all due respect, I'm not sure you really follow the argument being made here.

Yeast is a strain of microorganisms that consume the sugar in the juice, and produce a number of complex organic chemicals including alcohol, but also a number of others, some of which provide, yes, fruity flavours. When we find a strain that provides a flavour profile we like, we isolate it, breed more, and then, yes, package them and sell them to vintners that want it.

> And these flavors then turned up in the liqour store on the wine where the yeast was used.

Yeah, that's one of the key pointS of winemaking. All winemaking. Everywhere. All types. You pick an appropriate strain of yeast to yield the finished product you want; it's a critical step in the process.

> So the yeast was used as direct flavoring.

...no. Yeast does not end up in the finished product, and is not used as a direct flavouring.

> My point is that it's processed wine and this isn't clear to the consumer.

All wine is processed wine; wine making is one of the oldest industrial processes, dating back six thousand years. Was there some specific part of how this wine is processed you have an issue with? And if so, what? And why?

> And I'll gladly await the EU decision on whether or not wine distributors will have to declare contents.

But they've got the same ingredients right? Grapes, yeast, maybe some extra sugar and water? What are you expecting to see on the "bad" wine label that you won't see on "good" wine?

Edit: Looking at your other comments, it seems you're mostly upset about the idea that some wines might have two seperate fermentation stages. But this is a traditional wine making technique for centuries; it's a defining trait of the champagne and governo methods. So I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Wine is a heavily processed product; what's wrong with these particular processes?

> But they've got the same ingredients right? Grapes, yeast, maybe some extra sugar and water? What are you expecting to see on the "bad" wine label that you won't see on "good" wine?

What processing aids and additives are used. A list of allowed chemicals is found here: http://redax.tv4.se/kallafakta/LISTA%20TILLSATSER_ALLERGENER... I don't care one way or another but "wine snobs" claim some of these are giving them headaches.

So perhaps something like the Reinheitsgebot for beer?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot

From your link:

> In addition, the law allows the use of powdered or ground hops and hops extracts, as well as stabilization and fining agents such as PVPP. Top-fermented beer is subject to the same rules, with the addition that a wider variety of malted grains can be used, as well as pure sugars for flavor and coloring.

That sounds like the exact sorts of things the original commenter was upset about with wine. And many of the things in the list the guy you were replying to linked are "stabilization and fining agents".

I don't read Swedish, but glancing through that list I do recognize several very traditional and widely used preservatives and fining agents, which are used in traditional wine making. Plus fining agents, by design, aren't present in the finished product so I'm still not clear on what a labelling law is meant to achieve.

Example: A traditional fining agent in that list is egg albumen (aka egg whites). No detectable traces remain in the finished product. Is that a problem? Why? That list highlights it as an allergen in red, but again, it's not in the wine and (unsurprisingly) studies show they do not cause allergic reactions.

If there are specific concerns about specific additives, then 1) they should probably be banned from all products, not just wine and 2) we should be having a conversation about those specific additives. General concern about "additives", in general, just comes across as scaremongering.

I hope you can see why a vegan would have a problem with egg whites being used as a processing aid.

Sure, and some wineries do label their wine as vegan, which is great.

But this was about someone saying they only wanted to drink "real" wine and hoping for a law that would require ingredients to be listed. But traditional wine production often uses fining agents such as egg whites, and it's not an ingredient, is not present in the final product, and would not be listed on a list of ingredients. So I don't really see the relevance.

(If it helps, pretend I said Polyvinylpolypyrrolidone instead, which has no vegan concerns. Is its use as a fining agent a problem? Why?)

It's like the dihydrogen monoxide scare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax - you start using words like "chemicals", "industrial", "process" and people get worried. Even more so when you add "money" or "profit"

> you start using words like "chemicals", "industrial", "process" and people get worried. Even more so when you add "money" or "profit"

Ummh not sure if this is sarcasm but most of the time, rightfully so. Especially when you add the last two words.

> The report showed that a company dedicated to producing and selling flavored yeasts were marketing specific yeasts with flavors. And these flavors then turned up in the liqour store on the wine where the yeast was used. So the yeast was used as direct flavoring.

Sure, take a look at https://www.wyeastlab.com/beer-strains/, one of the big yeast providers for brewers (though they do sell wine yeasts as well.) You'll see that each yeast is described by what it contributes to the finished product: "fruity" or "earthy" or "neutral" or "grainy", even referencing particular types of fruit. I'm not sure what the problem here is. The flavor and aroma of any wine results from the interaction of must, yeast, fermentation vessel, temperature and time.

Source, please?

(I am Italian, my family used to own a small vineyard so I have some hands-on experience on wine making, albeit we made it only for our own family).

I find the part about "yeasts" a bit difficult to believe, but I have been wrong in the past so I would like to find out more.

Well, I'm from Rome and I remember the stories of my friends having to toss their wine batches because they added too much "polverina" to the mix. I also remember one time I nearly got into a fight with a producer at a summer show, when I commented to a friend (unaware the other guy was standing next to me, I guess I had enough already ;) that this "barrique" they were peddling really tasted of supermarket wine washed in wood flakes, and you could tell the two "tastes" apart like they were glued together by a child.

This is not what the OP was talking about, though. I do know about faking wood barrel ripening with wood flakes and I heard about "polverina", but the latter is, for what I know, something of the past (and the Ethanol scare in Italy played a large role in taking it out of the game, for what I know).

In other words: "the plural of anecdote is not data" - I would like to get to the source and understand better the "flavored yeasts" claims. And also see what countries the article was talking about.

Yeasts are like "nano bots" that you can program to create very complex chemicals. In this case they are used to create specific taste molecules.

They are also used in some breads so they stay soft for weeks.

Thanks, I do know what yeasts are. My point is that (most probably due to the very small quantity of wine we produced) we never added any yeast to the grapes. I.e. fermentation was catalyzed by kloeckera-apiculata [1] which is normally found in nature (small deposits on the grapes, etc.).

The OP seems to imply that different yeasts are prominent in industrial-size wine production (again, this may very well be the case: as I mentioned I have been proven wrong about industrial winemaking at least once in the past) so I would like to learn more about that, and I would be even more interested in understanding how different countries go at it.

[1] https://eurekabrewing.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/hello-my-name...

I guess that in countries like Italy, Spain or France that produce and consume their own wines mostly , the "tricks" and manipulation won't be as much, i have some friends who work in the wine industry and never heard of those things either, other countries that import most the wine probably the distributors would manipulate it to please and to get more market. Here you can find good wines from 5-6 euros the bottle, of course there are more expensive ones but for everyday. I'm from Spain. Edit: corrected some misspelling.

I would agree with you, but the OP claimed:

That's a classic but lately a swedish journalist uncovered that the wine we drink in Europe is largely bogus.

So I wanted to understand better what "Europe" means in his/her mind.

Making wine is all about the fermentation, and the fermentation is all about the yeast, so no surprise that what yeast you use will have a big impact on flavor. This isn't some cynical manipulation any more than choosing the grape variety. Pair your yeast and your grape to try to get a good outcome.

Here are some yeasts and some of their flavor effects:

https://winemakermag.com/yeast-strains-chart

>Essentially distributors buy wine from a country like south africa or germany for example. Then they process it, often here in Sweden or in another european country. And that's where they add things like oak flakes to fake oak cask maturing, and of course the industrial yeast to add other flavors.

If you add yeast to wine that's already finished it's secondary fermentation (which it has, if it's being called wine), it won't do anything, because there's no sugar left. You could add more sugar at the same time, but you'll send the alcohol percentage to the moon in the process. Wine yeast is likely to cap out at ~17% if you keep adding sugar (although it's hard to start a fermentation targeting above ~%12, to hit higher percentages you usually have to feed some sugar during primary fermentation).

TL;DR your explanation doesn't make sense. If you mean they're buying /must/ from south africa or germany and adding yeast then....yeah, that's how cheap wine is made. You didn't think the guys who made goonsacks had their own artisnal fruit presses, did you?

That's pretty insidious. It's like Orange Juice flavor packets[1] but way more sophisticated. Instead of wanting a uniform predictable flavor across regions and seasons, here, instead they want to mimic local preferences and terroir.

[1]http://unclematts.com/resources/flavor-packet-faqs/

Yeast doesn't work like that. Different yeasts do indeed produce different flavours, but to produce them you add them for the fermentation stage, not afterwards as flavouring components.

I remember, here in the United States, we used to have "wine coolers" back in the mid to late '80s. Was never much of a drinker myself, and underage back then anyway, so can't say much about the quality, but your "wine drink" remark brought that back to mind. Thanks!

Wine coolers are just an alternate path to what Europeans call "alcopop", but via the US's oddball tax structure.

It's just cheap but high-ABV wine, cut down with water and flavoring (to something like 5% ABV).

(The other path to roughly the same end product is by taking cheap beer and running it through a charcoal filter, then flavoring the result. Neither process would make sense if you could just sell an ethanol+water mixture without getting a tax break for not having distilled anything to get there.)

Wine coolers also exist in Europe. I don't know whether they are motivated by the same tax concerns.

E.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Cooler

> I've completely stopped buying the generic wine from our national alcohol store after seeing this.

... why? If you couldn't tell by taste and needed to hear about it from an investigative journalist, doesn't that mean it's an equivalently-good product for way cheaper?

What is a "generic wine?"