How much water into wine?

The World Wine Trade Group (WWTG) held its annual plenary meeting in Santiago de Chile this year, gathering representatives of governments and wine industries from nine member countries along with specially invited observers from Great Britain, Brazil, Japan and Russia.

The big topic of discussion at the meeting, held from October 21 to 23, was water usage.

Who are they?

The WWTG, a group of government and industry representations from a number of wine producing countries, has a 13% share of the world’s winegrowing area, which is responsible for 36% of global wine production.

Founded in 1998 by a group of seven New World winemaking countries, its members now comprise Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Georgia, New Zealand, South Africa, Uruguay and the USA, which together control a total volume of wine trade estimated at $8.6bn in value. The WWTG’s goal is to eliminate trade barriers and restrictions, while also protecting consumers.

“WWTG principles are based on the recognition of each country’s regulatory system, on mutual acceptance of winemaking practices and labelling, rather than imposing a single regulatory approach,” said Federico Mekis, chair of WWTG’s industry section. “The only basic condition is that our final product is wine. And we managed to define the notion of wine during our very first meeting in Argentina. Since then, we [have] had about 45 important agreements and statements.”

Among the most important documents issued by the WWTG, according to Mekis, are the agreements on a mutual acceptance of oenological practices and labelling, a memorandum on certification requirements, and a statement on analytical methodology.

A key topic on the agenda in Chile was “wine and health experiences”. Results of a special study by the Catholic University of Chile on the advantages of the Mediterranean diet were presented at the plenary meeting and followed by open discussion. The need for better coordination between the WWTG and the World Health Organization (WHO) was almost unanimously agreed upon.

“What worries me is the obsession of the World Health Organization that makes no distinction between fermented products containing alcohol, such as wine, and other alcoholic drinks,” said Mekis, adding that while the whole wine trade suffers from this categorisation, “we still hope to indicate cultural difference between wine and other products”.

The water issue

One of the most exciting discussions at the WWTG meeting was on the theme of water and its technical use in wine production.

“Wine is made in a really wide variety of places and conditions, and winemaking practices differ from country to country, between vintages and varieties, to reflect those different conditions,” said Jeffrey Clarke, New Zealand Winegrowers’ general manager of advocacy and general counsel. “One of those winemaking practices that differs a bit from place to place is the use of water during the process of making wine. Everyone agrees that you can never add water to dilute wine. And everyone agrees that winemakers can use water to mix in additives like yeast, and for rinsing and other technical functions – but the precise boundaries of those technical uses vary from place to place around the world.”

Delegations from Australia and Argentina prepared two detailed yet controversial presentations on the subject.

According to Australian rules, wine must not contain more than 70ml per litre of added water, whether “technological” (added to incorporate any permitted additive or processing aid) or “incidental” (a small amount which could stay inside tanks or presses after washing, hoses emptying etc).
The Argentine National Institute of Vitiviniculture (INV) presented its study on the requirements of technological water use, according to which the highest percentage of water needed to dissolve oenological products, considering different winemaking practices, was determined to be 2.4%. The same study estimated the tolerance percentage for other oenological practices as 0.4%. The Technical Advisory Committee of INV validated the technological water limit at a maximum level of 2.8%, which is lower than the level allowed in Australia.

This is partly explained by the fact that in Australia and some other wine countries, water may also be added “to facilitate fermentation”, or in other words, to dilute the high sugar-content grape must. This practice is allowed if water is added prior to fermentation and if it does not dilute the must below 13.5 degrees Baume.

According to the Australian Wine Research Institute presentation from Dr Eric Wilkes, detecting added water in wine is costly and rarely gives 100% evidence of violation.

Normally, “technological” water can be detected from the grape water by isotope measurement and comparison of the oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 ratio in different samples of wine.

“If fresh water was added to must or wine, it is most likely going to have lower 18O to 16O ratio,” Dr Wilkes said. But it was also admitted that really accurate investigations should consider all the climatic factors, such as distance from the sea or duration of recent rainfalls. “It is costly, and it takes a long time, and the last trials show that 18O to 16O ratio measurements are not sensitive enough to identify water dilution of juice up to 1 Baume in final wine,” concluded Dr Wilkes.

Most participants were in principle ready to agree upon a statement on the technical use of water, but it was still under discussion by the end of the plenary meeting.

“We began drafting a statement to clearly describe the range of legitimate uses of water in winemaking,” said Clarke. “Doing this is helpful to regulators: if a country passes a regulation that inadvertently prohibits winemaking practices that are legitimate and accepted elsewhere, it acts as a barrier to smooth global trade in wine. That harms everyone. Our philosophy at the WWTG is that we recognise the range of legitimate winemaking practices that exist among our members (and beyond), and work to remove barriers to trade in that wine.”

However, some of the observers invited to the meeting were concerned about “unpredictable” consumer reactions to a statement on the provocative subject.

“Modifying the initial conditions of wine will change its genuine terroir character,” said Katsuhisa Fujino, senior winemaker with the Japanese Union of Oenologists. “Personally, I understand how difficult it may be to produce quality wine in [the] hot and dry climatic conditions of Australia, but… We need to think about consumers who might not be ready to realise that water is actually added into wine. Japanese wine producers do not add water into wine and neither do European winemakers. It will not be easy to convince our customers that Australians really have to do it.”

The tight format of the meeting – held over two days – as well as the curfew imposed in Santiago at the time due to the unrest throughout the city, meant there wasn’t enough time to discuss the use of osmotic water that can be extracted from grapes, which can’t be considered additional water.
Any discussion of effective measurement tools also needed more time. As one delegate said during the lobby discussion, if water use is to be considered part of modern practice, there also has to be an effective way of controlling its use.

“In Georgia, the addition of water into wine is strictly forbidden by law,” said Levan Mekhuzla, chairman of the Georgian National Wine Agency. “Diluting unfermented must to lower sugar concentration is not allowed either. Yet we need to use water for some of the technological operations, such as preparing cultivated yeasts for fermentation or bentonite for clarification of wine. We need to be very accurate about it.”

Mekhuzla admitted that uncontrolled addition of water into wine used to be common practice in the former Soviet Union, where producers had to implement state production plans. That dilution ruined the reputation of many ex-Soviet producers, and not only in the wine industry. Mekhuzla recalled a popular joke of the early 1980s, in which a dairy factory reported to the state that it was ready to implement the next year’s plan to triple the production of milk, but that it would require three times more water.

After a presentation from the Russian wine industry prepared by the Double Magnum agency for one of the WWTG sessions in Santiago, an official letter was sent to the Russian Union of Winegrowers and Winemakers, inviting representatives to participate in the intersessional WWTG meeting next April.