Winebits 469: U.S. wine consumption, corks, flavored tannins
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
This week’s wine news: U.S. wine consumption lags the world, plus corks make a comeback and fake tannins
• 16th is pretty sad: U.S. per capita wine consumption, a little more than a bottle a month, is 16th among the word’s 21 biggest wine consuming countries. Which is depressing enough, since we had a wine revolution in this country over the past 20 years. But even more depressing – that figure has been flat since I started writing the blog 10 years ago. We can talk about how much the country drinks overall and we can talk about how much we spend, but as I have written many times before, Americans aren’t all that interested in wine and most of the wine we drink is consumed by a hard-cord group of frequent wine drinkers. And until we make wine more accessible and easier to understand, that will continue to be the case.
• A technologically perfect cork? Talk to winemakers, and they’ll tell you that advances in cork manufacture have all but eliminated cork taint – the chemical compound that gets into wine from a flawed cork and ruins the wine. This story from Reuters expands on the subject, and talks about how cork is making a comeback with producers at the expense of screw caps. Cork is used on about 60 percent of wine bottles in the U.S. and around 70 percent worldwide; the remainder are plastic and composite corks (10 percent) and screwcaps (20 percent). Even this, though, is much less than the late 20th century,when cork controlled 95 percent of the market. The story misses one point, which goes to the heart of the U.S. wine consumption problem. No matter how good corks are as a closure, they aren’t as easy to open as a screwcap.
• Just like fake oak: Tannins occur naturally in wine from the tannic acid in the grape’s skins, stems, and seeds, and well-made wines at any price must take tannins into account. But adding fake tannins – literally, a bottle of tannic acid – is not uncommon, as this news release demonstrates. “Oenotan is an all-natural, water soluble, freeze-dried, tannin crystal made from 2 year air-dried French oak. … is available in three distinct profiles, Authentique, Vanilla and Mocha.” Yummy, huh? And people wonder why the wine business doesn’t want ingredient labels.