How to check if wine is natural or powdered. Powdered wine - truth or myth? Grape wine preparation technology

08.03.2020

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With preservatives: wine made according to the "accelerated" technology, with salicylic acid in its composition to prevent souring.
Mixture: blending of low-quality and good wine to give the drink a more acceptable smell and taste.
Tinted: a mixture of wines with the addition of dyes (not always natural) to achieve the desired color.
Substitution: low-quality wine with replacement of labels, corks, excise taxes.
Camouflage: pouring low-quality wine into a part of a batch of a well-known brand.

What to look for

In the shop:

Obviously, but let's clarify: the wines in the boxes are of low quality. Normal wine is never stored in this form.
The sugar content in wine should be as follows: in dry wines - up to 4 g / l; in semi-dry - up to 18 g / l; in semi-sweet - up to 45 g / l, in sweet - at least 45 g / l. If there is more sugar and the label does not say that the wine is fortified, then it was added artificially.
If salicylic acid is present in the wine, it means that the wine was made with. The scary ingredient E220 (sulfur dioxide) will be present in any wine, as it is a natural byproduct of fermentation.

The date of manufacture must be stamped separately from the essential information on the label. All fonts should be clear, without typos, blurring, printing defects. The inscription on the label must correspond to the inscription on the cork.
Vintage (and therefore infused in oak barrels) there is no powder wine. As well as artificial dry. This is because it is cheaper and easier to make a sweet concentrate, roughly similar to the taste of wine.
If you are a connoisseur of a certain brand of wine, then you should be alarmed by changing the original bottle (asymmetric, branded) to a regular one.

Houses:

When you add a pinch of regular baking soda, natural wine will change color due to reaction with grape starch. The synthetic will remain the same.
When a few drops of glycerin are added to natural wine, it will sink to the bottom and will not change its color. If the glycerin changes color to yellow or red, then this is powdered wine.
When shaking the bottle in good drink the foam will collect in the center and subside quickly enough. In a low quality product, foam will collect around the edges and slowly settle.
Place a drop of wine on a regular piece of chalk. If the stain lightens after drying, the wine is natural. If the stain has changed color, it contains dyes.

Your "chemical" experiments will become even more spectacular for the guests who brought the wine. But, believe me, it is better when healthy to laugh at the eccentricity of a friend than to curse the unfortunate cookie with which everyone was poisoned.

I love wine. Probably I know little about it, but I prefer wine to stronger drinks. No dry, I don't like it, if only for a change. And here dessert wines the very thing.

When purchasing inexpensive Russian-made wine, buyers are often interested in whether it is "powder". Let's figure out where the legend about "powdered wine" came from and how much it corresponds to the truth.

Usually "powder" is considered to be a cheap wine released to a little-known general public. Russian manufacturer... It is understood that in its production, instead of fermentation of grape must, a certain "wine powder" is used, which is diluted with water with the addition of alcohol. Opinions differ regarding the composition of this powder: according to optimists, "wine powder" is produced by evaporating grape juice and is generally natural product... Pessimists believe that it is made by mixing sugar, citric acid, food colors and all kinds of flavors.

How true is this legend and what is it based on? Firstly, after the collapse of the USSR, most of the wine-making regions - Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia - ended up outside the borders of Russia. Although in recent years, domestic viticulture and winemaking has been developing very actively, which is facilitated by government support measures, still wine produced in Russia from grapes grown here covers only about 30% of market needs. Bottled imports account for about the same or slightly less, but imported wines are much more expensive and not affordable for all consumers.

The rest of the market is occupied by wines of Russian production (and according to the law, the place of production alcoholic beverage is considered a bottling line), which are made from imported wine materials purchased from different countries and imported into the country in bulk tanks - in the slang of winemakers, these wine materials are called bulk.

The term "wine material" means dry wine, intended for subsequent further processing. In the simplest case, it is simply bottled and put on sale, but it can be blended, i.e. to mix different varieties for a more interesting bouquet, aging in oak barrels or champagne - almost all inexpensive sparkling wine, produced in Russia, are prepared precisely from the bulk.

Most of these wines are produced at little-known wineries located near large cities - during the Soviet industrialization, they were placed closer to consumers and skilled labor, and raw materials could be imported from any region.

Most of these wines are of quite acceptable quality, although complaints about them are still not uncommon. The fact is that bulk, as a rule, is purchased on the spot market, where it will turn up cheaper, one batch from Spain - another from Chile or Moldova. Therefore, there are frequent cases when, when trying to buy a wine he likes, a customer is faced with a drink that is completely different in taste - albeit bottled in exactly the same bottle. On the counter-label, on the reverse side, you can read the inscription in small print: "Made from dry wine material."

A person who is far from familiarizing himself with the intricacies of wine-making technologies immediately comes up with a certain concentrate powder - although at the same time, reading the inscription "dry wine" on the label, he does not at all expect that there will be some "powder" under the cork. This is one of the reasons for the emergence of the legend of "powdered wine".

There is another. In the 90s, in the markets of coastal resort villages in the Crimea, on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, in the southern regions of Ukraine, semi-underground trade in cheap "house wine" in plastic egg bottles was very widespread. Sometimes it really was a simple home-made "dry land", but very often enterprising traders simply took a dry concentrate popular at that time like "Invite" or "Yuppi" and diluted it with water with the addition of vodka.

The resulting liquid was not in any way wine - in modern parlance, it was a typical surrogate - but it was moderately sweet, moderately sour and contained alcohol. Among inexperienced vacationers who were primarily interested in the alcohol content, and not the taste and aroma, these surrogates, due to their cheapness, sold out with a bang. And the entire local district knew that "Baba Manya drives wine from powder."

Actually, these two very real reasons, bizarrely combined in the mass consciousness, gave rise to the myth of "powder wine". And to what extent is it possible and realistic to produce wine - real wine, and not a substitute - from any "dry concentrates"? After all, concentrated juices delivered from exotic countries are used for the production of juices and nectars? ..

Firstly, the cost of one liter of imported wine material is about $ 0.6-0.8, or about 40-50 rubles for our money, but in some cases (low quality, excess harvest, etc.) below. There is no economic sense for manufacturers to bother with "evaporation" and subsequent "recovery". The costs of "production" of such wine are reduced in the simplest case to bottling and labeling, and are more than offset even in the lowest-budget segment.

Defective wine material, which has obvious flaws in taste and aroma and is unsuitable for direct bottling, can be purchased even cheaper. To correct the taste, sweeteners (usually ordinary sugar), acidity regulators ( citric acid) and other ingredients. Often, the content of the original wine material in such a drink is only 50% by volume.

The law does not allow the resulting product to be called wine, and it is labeled as a "wine drink" - on the shelves of chain stores, such swill can be found in paper bags at a price of about 100 rubles per liter, if not cheaper. It is completely safe for health, but there is no need to talk about any taste. Such products also find their consumers among the hunters for cheap degrees.

At the same time, the level of state control over the alcohol industry in Russia today is extremely high, and none of the legal producers will risk an expensive license for a penny profit. Than to chew with "powders", it is much easier to absolutely legally drive a cheap shmurdyak by writing "wine drink" on the label.

There is one more thing - a technological one. In the process of making wine, in the course of yeast fermentation, not only the natural grape sugar contained in the wort is converted into alcohol, but also many other chemical processes. As a result, natural wine - good or bad - doesn't taste like grape juice at all. And it is impossible to prepare "wine" by adding water and alcohol to a concentrate of grape juice - no matter whether it is dry or pasty. You can easily verify this for yourself: take a packet of grape juice, add a little vodka there and try it. You will get vodka with grape juice, and the resulting "cocktail" will turn out to be completely different from wine.

Often in stores, instead of real grape wine, they offer not very high-quality powdered drinks. They are made from evaporated grape must, adding flavors, flavor enhancers and other ingredients. To call the liquid obtained in this way useful and really delicious drink hard.

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How to identify powdered wine in a store

You can distinguish real wine from fake wine even before purchasing it. First of all, you should look at the price of the drink. The lower it is, the more likely it is that you have powdered wine in front of you. The fact is that growing grapes is expensive, not to mention the processing, storage and transportation of the drink. Of course, manufacturers will not sell their products at a loss, therefore, high-quality, good wines are expensive.

Unfortunately, even purchasing a drink at a high price does not guarantee that you have protected yourself from counterfeiting. Some sellers deliberately raise the price to convince the buyer of the impeccable quality of the product.

Powdered wines are almost always sold in cardboard boxes. Natural, quality drinks are stored in glass bottles. The cheaper the container, the higher the chance that it contains a low-grade drink.

Pay particular attention to the shade of the liquid. Natural wines tend to have a pleasant soft color. Powder, on the contrary, are often too bright, unnatural. However, only cheap and completely low-quality fakes can be distinguished on this basis.

Consider one more important point: when buying fortified and dessert wines, it is easy to come across a counterfeit, so you need to pay special attention to their choice. Dry wines, on the other hand, are more difficult to counterfeit because they contain less sugar, which means that it is too difficult to interrupt the characteristic chemical flavor.

The difference between powdered wine and natural

If you've already bought wine, try to determine if it's natural or powdered by taste and aroma. In artificial drinks, the smell is often too harsh, too pronounced. This is especially easy to see for those who have already tasted quality natural drinks.