Wine. It is what it isn't.

Most people think they know what wine is. You probably think you know what wine is.

Ah, gentle reader, you do not. Nobody does.

Fermented grape juice they say. Ha! The non alcoholic we bottled in Napa Valley was made of fermented grape juice. We just took the alcohol out. Everything else was exactly the same.

As a matter of fact, it was so exactly the same the we remain the only non alcoholic wine in history to win a gold medal against wines with alcohol (1986 L.A. County Fair —the biggest wine awards tasting in the United States).

It was so exactly the same that we had a white, a rose, and a sparkling wine that were indistinguishable from their alcoholic counterparts. Sugar was the secret—riesling, gewurztraminer, dessert wines —all of those can be made to equal or surpass their alcoholic counterparts.

The chardonnay sucked. The cabernet sucked. If we had made a pinot noir, it would have sucked. The alcohol is the biggest part of the taste of those wines—people were always telling us, “ I don’t know, it’s missing something.” Hell, yes it was missing something.

Alcohol.

Alcohol is the main taste of those wines. Once you separate alcohol from chardonnay or cabernet or other grapes usually made dry, it’s amazing how little taste is left.

To make those wines work you have to invent a substitute for alcohol that is not alcohol and has none of its effects. Good luck with that.

Hardly anybody in the wine business knows that because, none of them have ever tasted wine that has the alcohol removed without altering the molecules of the wine in any way. Usually these kinds of wines are heated or chilled or otherwise violated to get the alcohol out.

So, I wasn’t buying we shouldn’t just be called “wine”.

Your United States government was confused. They said a) that was impossible and b) even if it was possible, they were having none of it. After frank and open discussions, as they say on TV, the government allowed as how we could call it “other than standard wine.”

There was of course, nothing I wanted to do more than sell something called “other than standard wine” ---we might as well call it “bad wine.” At least we might get some novelty sales.

OK, says I. We’ll write “other than standard wine” on it if you write “wine” on rubbing alcohol. If just removing the alcohol from fermented grape juice made it no longer wine, then wine must be alcohol.

I thought I was being very reasonable. See, the thing is, if alcohol is wine, then it has to be taxed like wine and your mouthwash will cost $25 a bottle. Also, there was then no reason to tax us. Don’t tell me I’m not wine, then tax me like wine.

If wine is fermented grape juice under 14%, then fine, we were fermented grape juice under 14% alcohol. Way under.

They seemed troubled.

“I’m sure”, I said, “that the IRS wouldn’t want to be unfair.”

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Wine and Government

Now, you may think the biggest problem with non alcoholic wine was the non alcoholic part. Hah! I say unto you. And, Hah! again. That’s the easy part. That’s just chemistry—molecules in, molecules out, that sort of thing.

The hard part is the government of these United States. Just like that great vintner Jesus, in the wine business the government is always teaching you to observe whatsoever they have commanded you and lo, they are with you always, even unto the end of time. (more or less Mathew 28:20).

The government lurks in the shadows of every vineyard, scampers under the canopies at night, lies in wait, then rising with the morning dew on the vines at first light strikes when you least expect it.

Specifically in our case, the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms plus the Food and Drug Administration ground to a halt contemplating the greatest existential question of all, “What is wine?”

Is non alcoholic beer really “other than standard beer”? Why isn’t non alcoholic beer called “beer without alcohol?” How do you know which one this is a picture of?

According to their best minds, non alcoholic wine was impossible. Somebody had already drunk at least 60,000 bottles of something, but what it was, the government couldn’t say. I begged them to just define it and tell me what the definition was but they wouldn’t do that. That might get them criticized.

Government types don’t like to be criticized.

Instead, they said we should go on making it until somebody complained and then they might make a ruling. Maybe. A ruling which might shut down our whole operation and bankrupt all the investors. Here’s a little wine management tip: as a general rule in life, investors don’t enjoy going bankrupt.

The government is like a bad guardian angel that keeps baiting you to do the wrong thing, but doesn’t tell you what the right thing is.

You probably won’t believe this one either, but it is and was painfully, crushingly true.

The problem was that the great United States of America, the world’s greatest military power and savior of the entire homo sapiens species, didn’t have a line for non alcoholic wine on any of their forms. Therefore, legally, we did not exist.

Why not just print a new form you say? That would literally take an act of Congress.

We could put a man on the moon, send rovers to Mars and payloads far beyond the edge of the solar system, but we couldn’t figure out which file to put non alcoholic wine in.

Can you hear me Tommy Jefferson? Is this what you had in mind? Really? I swear I could hear John Adams stomping through the eel weed and marsh mud on his Massachusetts farm, shouting at the top of his lungs at the Potash and beating the frozen ground into submission with his cane in frustration.

For this we threw all that tea in the harbor? Good God.

I spent nearly two years working with your federal government to define what wine is. Clearly the question of what wine is raises deep spiritual issues of great import. Also tax basis.

I’m going to ignore the spiritual stuff though, and go ahead and report what these United States of America says wine is. It doesn’t take long.

They don’t know.

But, they tax it anyway.

The Government treats wine the way most of us treat pornography. They don’t know what it is, but they know it when they see it. And when they see it they tax it. For one thing, wine has alcohol and is made from grapes, isn’t it?

Well, non-alcoholic wine was made from grapes, but legally it had no alcohol. If the Government decided that the amount of alcohol in our wine was taxable then they would have to tax orange juice, chocolate and Diet Coke for the same reason and they just weren’t up for that.

What we made clearly wasn’t grape juice, because it had been fermented, which took all the sugar out. No sugar, no grape juice. Nature does grape juice with sugar. As a matter of fact, for Nature sugar is kind of the whole point of grape juice.

“Either give me more wine or leave me alone.” ― Rumi, 13th century mystic poet

Where to turn? For the government bureaucracies of ancient civilizations it was a lot easier. Everyone knew that wine was God (or Goddess). Geshtinanna the Sumerian Wine Goddess, Roman Bachhus, Persian Spenta Amaiti—you get the idea.

The wine God was not the most stable brick in the load so you didn’t mess with him. It was simple. You don’t tax God. God taxes you. Since it is the firm opinion of the United States Government that wine is not God, it’s more complicated today.

After a year and half of discussions the US Government still couldn’t decide on what wine is. In classic governmental fashion, it opted instead to decide what wine is not. Here are the actual results. I’m not making this up. I could be, but I’m not. I don’t have to.

The truth is weird enough all ready.

Wine is not a banana.

Due to issues of fermentation, this proved puzzling for all concerned. The definition of wine revolves around fruit. Indeed, one could make a banana wine if one was very strange. But, it was harder to argue that a wine is not a banana than that a banana is not a wine. Taxes and all that. Once you got over that part though, one could reasonably generalize that fact to include all fruit. Wine was probably not a watermelon either. Or a cumquat.

Wine is not the amount of alcohol.

The government of the United States, as wonderful as it is, is probably not the best choice to define wine. You might know they’d use tax codes. Who would do that? Who would define wine by tax codes? Against all reason, obviously the government did. It seemed random, but then it had the virtue of being enforceable, which was a big plus for tax people.

When I was enjoying frank and open discussions with the FDA and the BATF in Washington over what was wine or was not, we did tests for alcohol levels in other food products.

We randomly took chocolate, oranges and Seven Up from a very successful health food chain in Los Angeles. All three of them had more alcohol than we did. The fresh orange juice was a killer. If drinking less than 1% alcohol got you wild and crazy, then this orange juice should have been in jail. So, I mused, alcohol in orange juice is OK but not in grape juice.

Fruit discrimination.

Like I said, I’m not about to try to tell you for sure what wine is, but it’s definitely not alcohol level.

Wine is not alcohol itself.

If wine is not the presence of alcohol, maybe it was alcohol itself. But then, if that were true, wouldn’t Vodka be wine? Vodka has a lot of alcohol. Especially, the ones I buy. You can make Vodka from grapes. Grape Vodka has never really caught on though. Lemon. Raspberry. Orange. Definitely. But not grape.

As I mentioned earlier the BATF wanted to make us write “other than standard wine” on the label. I told them we’d rather write “better than standard wine” but they wouldn’t go for that. Finally it ended up being “wine without alcohol,” thereby federally decreeing that wine is not alcohol.

See, I told you.

Sauerkraut is fermented cabbage. Does that mean cabbage is non alcoholic sauerkraut? from www.foodrepublic.com

The Glory of Fermentation

Wine is not fermented grape juice. It is probably fermented something, but grapes are irrelevant to whether or not it’s wine. Rice, barley, dandelions, blueberries, apples, pineapples, and pretty much anything else you can get to ferment by adding sugar to it are all wine.

Your general public drinker of wine will probably tell you that wine is fermented grape juice. But, how about Dandelion wine? That stuff your great grandmother used to make. Or, pineapple wine, always a favorite in Hawaii. Ginger wine from England is fortified with brandy (distilled grape juice). What’s that about? Is it wine or is it brandy? Can’t anybody make up their mind here?

Well, I deduced, wine is definitely something that’s been fermented. But that could be yogurt. Or, sauerkraut. Clearly more precision was needed.

And, to add to the IRS’s headaches, there are gold medal winning Napa Valley cabernets that are taxed as “dessert wines” because they are over 14% alcohol. Sometimes they are 16%.

So, what are they? Nobody sober would drink these for dessert. But they are expensive and they win prizes.

Wine may or may not be God.

I’m not really qualified to answer that. I’ll leave that to you.

DISCLAIMER:

The non alcoholic wines that exist today are not made the same way, or with the same grapes as ours were. They taste nothing like what we did. If there’s a decent one out there, I haven’t tasted it. So, if you buy one these days, don’t blame me if it tastes like watered down kool-aid. In the immortal words of the Peanuts comic strip, “It’s not my fault. I wasn’t there. I didn’t do it.”

from “Wine Folly”, www.winefolly.com