Light wine or is it déja-vu all over again?
By John Schreiner
February 20, 2008
A Spanish winery, Bodegas Casa de la Ermita, is trumpeting that it has spent 2.5 million Euros to develop a light wine that goes easy on the calories.
The claim brought a smile to Okanagan winemaker Elias Phiniotis. He thinks that the Spaniards could have saving themselves quite a bit of money by using a Canadian consultant. He did not propose himself but there is probably no one in Canada with a longer list of light wines to his credit. Perhaps if he had had vinifera grapes to work with, like the Spaniards, many of those wines would still be around.
Casa de la Ermita’s wine is a red with 6.5% alcohol content made with a blend of Monastrell, Tempranillo and Petit Verdot. A white partner wine is still be worked on. The winery apparently has worked on these wines for three years with help from two Spanish universities.
The wine hits the Spanish market in April for about $15 a bottle and will be released in Britain later in the year. There is no word of sales to this market yet.
It is being sold on its health merits. "As people become more and more health conscious, they are demanding different products, and we decided wine could also take this path,” says the winery’s managing director, Pedro Martinez. Presumably, it is healthy because it has half the usual alcohol level and apparently fewer calories.
The British newspaper that reported this wine explained the technique this way: “The vineyard achieves the low alcohol content by reducing the amount of water the vines are given, which lowers the amount of sugar produced by the grapes.” Then a low-efficiency yeast was used in fermentation to ensure that “some of the sugar fails to turn into alcohol.”
The reporter probably did not get it straight. As Phiniotis points out, when vines are starved for water, the few grape bunches they produced are higher in sugar. Very likely, the vineyard is over-watered so that the grape bunches are diluted before they reach the winery. That sounds easy but diluted grapes are unlikely to make wine with much flavour.
Most wineries today reduce alcohol levels with reverse osmosis. There are non-alcoholic wines in the grocery stores. The trouble is that they don’t taste all that great because the balance has been upset.
As for low alcohol wines being low in calories, the saving is not much. Phiniotis says that a 200 ml glass of dry wine has about 140 calories. A so-called light wine is only likely to have 50 fewer calories because there will be some residual sugar to give the wine body. That’s not much of a diet.
Anyone with a long memory will remember that light wines were all the rage among Canadian wineries in the late 1970s. Yes, the savings in calories was also one the virtues. Those wines had alcohol levels in the seven to eight percent range.
That was before reverse osmosis. Phiniotis won’t disclose his methods but there is a hint when he says: “Why spend all the money and effort when pure water is the most popular and hygienic drink in the world?”
The list of low alcohol wines that he made, presumably with a judicious use of water, included: Fuddle Duck; Duddle Duck; Queenie; Yellow Bird; Sparkling Foch; La Scala Spumante; Fontana Bianco; Pastel Peach; Tiffany Red; Tiffany White; Sparkling Blush; Schloss Laderheim Light; Chillers and Strawberry Angel (Kosher).
In this same period, Casabello Winery in Penticton developed a low alcohol version of a brand called Capistro. (Phiniotis had a hand in that one, too.) Rather than water the wine, Casabello imported Thompson Seedless grape juice from California, which is low in sugar, and blended some into the wine. It was quite a successful product in its day.
Will the Spanish open the floodgates to a new generation of low-alcohol wines? Stay tuned. If I owned the brand, I would be thinking of bring Queenie back.
John Schreiner is author of The Wineries of British Columbia.
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