August 24 2009
More odds and ends from a wine-soaked life …
Relaxation Soft Drinks
It’s official. The apocalypse is upon us … instead of energy drinks, we’re now seeing relaxation soft drinks.
From the Washington Post (excerpted):
(These drinks) fall in(to) an emerging category of “relaxation beverages,” concocted to soothe the overextended, overbooked and overworked masses that have been hopped up on energy drinks for the past decade.
“I wasn’t the only person speaking 50 miles per hour,” said Peter Bianchi, who invented Drank. “It was my personal quest to relax the world.”
(Many) similar nonalcoholic beverages are hitting the market just as Americans are being beaten down by the longest recession since World War II, and industry marketers have seized on the drinks’ purported calming properties as the antidote for a stressed-out society. Vacation in a Bottle calls itself “the happy relaxation drink.” For Superliminal Purple Stuff Pro-Relaxation Formula, the name says it all. And iChill, a relaxation shot, urges users to “unwind from the grind.”
I guess these “relaxation” drinks are trading on an amino acid called L-theanine which is said to have calming properties, and was approved for the FDA in 2006.
Hello? Any of these relaxation drinking dudes ever heard of a restorative glass of vino at the end of the day? Doubtful.
When I want to unwind from a long day, I can’t think of anything better than a nice glass of vino. It works every time!
With the Resveratrol mania going strong, is there an over/under bet on when L-theanine will reverse engineer the process and find its way into a glass of wine?
Now, that may be the real apocalypse …!
Natural vs. “Normal” Winemaking
Speaking of additives to wine, last week I saw two very nice posts that neatly bookended natural wine versus “normal” winemaking.
Alice Feiring, at her blog, Veritas in Vino, codifies what it means to be a “natural” wine. Meanwhile, Keith Wallace, founder of the Wine School of Philadelphia details some of the “dirty secrets” of winemaking including the use of a substance called “Mega Purple.”
Now, I fully realize it’s overly simplistic to polarize the natural movement by juxtaposing it against “normal” winemaking, but given the absolute imbalance in production volumes between the two, it’s probably more accurate than not.
Alice notes, amongst other things, very simply, a natural wine is a wine where, “nothing gets added to the wine and nothing gets extracted.”
Easy enough. I’m fascinated by the natural wine movement, not for personal ideological reasons, but more because I’m fascinated by understanding both sides of extreme debates.
Meanwhile, Keith Wallace highlights the use of some of the “secrets” that are in a traditional winemakers bag of tricks, pumping his comments through a sensationalistic filter, noting:
Wine from mass-produced bulk grapes is going to be a tad nasty. More often than not, it will taste harsh and vegetal; possibly like a dead squirrel dipped in kerosene. This is where modern winemaking comes into play. There is a standard toolbox of secret winemaking techniques to shape up such craptacular vino.
Most of what Wallace goes onto highlight is reasonably benign and well-known amongst wine enthusiasts like chaptalization and using oak additives. However, what may be new to many wine enthusiasts is the use of a substance called “Mega Purple”
First highlighted by Dan Berger in a 2006 Wines & Vines article that went viral in the wine blogosphere, according to Wallace, “Winemakers use an estimated 10,000 gallons of the stuff every year—because only a tiny amount is needed to fix an entire barrel, Mega Purple is probably being added to over 25 million bottles of wine annually.”
He continues, “Mega Purple smoothes out the flavors, and give it a fruity wallop. It will also hide unwanted vegetal flavors and even mask certain types of spoilage. A former winemaker from California’s Central Coast tells me that ‘it’s used extensively around here. It pumps up a jammy quality and hides green flavors, especially in Cabernet.’”
Certainly, the use of Mega PurpIe gives cause to think about those jammy tooth-stainers from California and Australia for a tick longer than we may have otherwise.
Overall, be it a relaxation drink or a “natural” wine, the politics and the “side-taking” in wine is certainly one of the appealing draws for the intellectually curious. And, while I sometimes struggle with classifying wine into an orderly system in order to make sense of it, more and more I’m accepting that the chaos inherent to the world of wine is one of the chief draws for me.
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (3) |
I can guarantee you that most winemakers are filtering their product at some point because of smoke and a few other common factors.
How could they possibly disclose their entire operation?
The relaxation drink category is a funny one. However, I’m not too surprised there’s a market for it to house so many products already.
As for Mega Purple, I hadn’t heard of it until this post. I’m still torn on the issue. I agree to an extent it makes sense to use technological advancements when they help, but when does wine making cross the line into the controlled chemistry experiment of soft drinks?
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I don’t have a big problem with filtering and such, AS LONG AS WHAT IS DONE IS FULLY DISCLOSED. One winery in which we are a part of their wine club had some smoke damage to their Pinot due to fires last summer. They ran the juice through a filter and declassified all of those barrels. That wine is now available for purchase at a severely discounted price. I’ll probably buy a couple of bottles of it, because I TRUST the winemaker, and don’t believe they are hiding anything from me.
The ones that bother me are the ones that are doing stuff that isn’t disclosed.