Wine Club Newsletter - April 2013

Producers confused by E.U. regulations

By W. Blake Gray winesearcher.com

Listing potential allergens on wine labels seemed like a good idea when the European Commission introduced the system last year. But it is creating a catch-22 for wineries wanting to export to Europe.

Many wineries, especially large ones, use milk or egg products to fine their wines, a procedure that can soften harsh tannins and reduce oak flavors.

To protect people with milk and egg allergies, Australia and New Zealand have since 2002 required an allergen warning on wines fined with egg or milk products. So the E.U.'s move to require a similar warning didn't initially seem like a big deal.

But there's a problem: wineries that use these fining agents then filter them out, very effectively. By removing the allergens, the wineries are moving into a gray area of European law. Europe also has a truth-in-labeling law, so that if a wine has a sticker in 16 languages saying "Contains milk products," the winery is breaking the law if all the milk products have been removed.

This isn't a problem in Australia or New Zealand, because the law there requires that if egg or milk products have ever been used on the wine, that must be listed on the label whether there is residue or not.

A legal session this week on the new European regulations at the largest wine trade show in the U.S., the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento, California, left winery representatives confused and grasping for answers. When asked how filtered wines that show no residue of milk or egg products should be labeled, speaker James Takahashi declared, "Talk to your lawyer."

"If you can't detect it, you shouldn't put it on the label," said Takahashi, director of packaging quality at Constellation Brands, an international producer and marketer of wine, beer and spirits based in Victor, New York state.

However, he noted that the detection devices available to wineries aren't always accurate, whereas academic laboratories have equipment that can break apart chains of proteins and say where they're from.

Takahashi said European wineries have responded to the new regulations by "using weird combinations of chemicals, some of which are illegal in the U.S., instead of egg and milk so they don't have to deal with this."

Moreover, egg and milk allergies, while common in children, are rare in adults. The Paris-based International Organization of the Vine and Wine (OIV) searched throughout Europe for adults with these allergies but couldn't find enough to mount a study.

"Our target market is adults, not kids," Takahashi said. "If you're going to work with government regulations, you have to suspend logic, because the regulators aren't expert in what they're regulating."

That said, vegans will welcome the new regulations, although isinglass, a form of collagen derived from fish bladders, is a fining agent that is still not required to be labeled. And Takahashi acknowledged that the situation has at least made some wineries think about their fining practices.

"It's the wine industry and people will say, 'We always dump in X amount of casein [a milk protein]'," Takahashi said. "They don't run any trials. They don't know if it's necessary. You have to clarify the wine after that because the wine is all gummed up with the crap you put in it."