The details of the process are certainly interesting, it's just weird you framed them as "problem".
This results directly into degraded ecosystems because you basically use the land as a life-less substrate to produce your grapes and all the chemicals which are not degraded or bound to the grapes are ending in the soil.
That afterwards you do a lot a chemical work to convert the grapes into wine is another story.
Note that my salary is coming from both sides. I work as consultant to both the big agro companies and the ones doing food additives and fragrances.
Everybody on the line know very well the real cost of a $2 bottle of wine. But the buyers do not see that on the label only the money they have in the pocket or not.
A $2 bottle of wine is less wine and more creative engineering. And that's ok as long as the customers understand what they're getting.
The bar for entry at the high end is impossibly high. And those who are already up there have to offer something that cannot be cheaply obtained. A unique natural taste, the image (and protected brand), tradition, etc.
On the other end of the spectrum you have the cheap wines that have no choice but to try to replicate some of that by artificial means while competing with an almost literal flood of competition doing the exact same. The target there is to stay as cheap as humanly possible while minimally meeting regulation in the food sector, and offering wine-like taste.
See the wine like a battery. The cheapest and the most expensive ones look the same and might superficially act the same. And they'll certainly feel the same if you just test them with your tongue. They're on the same spectrum of products but there's a reason why they're at different ends.
“Don’t buy the $2 Trader Joe wine, buy our $20 wine not because it tastes better because we “we don’t use the land as a life-less substrate””
Externalities? Not necessarily. The organic, small farmer raised tomato probably has a much higher CO2 footprint than a corporate farm tomato from Mexico - efficiency at scale can be enormous.
This is the same as quality vs. quantity. Consume less but better. Buy less food, more expensive, but do not throw it away. Buy a good pair of shoes which you can get fixed and use for many years....
Same subject, more or less, which I really enjoyed reading:
"I’ve tracked every piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869464
After reading that article and the above comment I think I'd rather just mix some grape juice and vodka than some of that really cheap wine.
Virtually no wine, no matter how expensive, is just grapes and yeast. All wine you can buy in a store contains at least some additives.
However, the vast majority of wines do contain at least a small amount of added SO2.
There are plenty of expensive wines out there with lots of manipulative additives (sucrose, acidification or deacidification, oak powder, etc) as has been outlined above, but it is much more common in less expensive wine.
There is a scale between wine as a mass produced industrial product and as an artisanal, site-specific hand crafted product, and there are wineries/brands/specific wines that fill in every conceivable spot on that spectrum.
Oftentimes, individual wineries will have different lines of products made in different ways or even in different facilities. Estate grown vs purchased fruit. Physical wineries vs "private labels" made at custom crush facilities. A little tangential perhaps...
Personally I would be worry of pesticide residues in wines. Not just those bottom cheap bottles, but from all mass and non-bio certified producers. Few years ago there was high level of arsenic found in two-buch Chunk, but it is very common across the board: "Together the 34 bottles of conventional wine contained 148 pesticide residues. All 34 bottles contained at least one pesticide, while the mean number of pesticides per bottle was more than four. The highest number of residues found in a single bottle was 10."[0].
Those traces are probably not going to kill you, but let just not see all wines as being created equal.