Читать книгу Wine Faults and Flaws - Keith Grainger - Страница 15

The changes in the pattern of wine consumption of wine during the last 40 years have been dramatic. There has been spectacular growth in sales in many countries that have limited domestic production and accordingly rely upon imports to satisfy demand: for example, in the United Kingdom, per capita wine consumption rose from just 2 l in the early 1960s to 19.7 l in 2010–2016 [1]. In 2018, UK per capita consumption was approximately 24.6 l [2]. However, during the same period, the per capita consumption of many traditional European wine production countries declined by some 50%, albeit mostly of very low quality wines. Prior to the 1970s only 10% of all wines were exported from producing countries, including intra‐Europe ‘exports’; by 2016 over one‐third of wine consumed globally was produced in another country [1]. The journey undertaken to market wine in both bottle and bulk may be many thousands of miles, from the New World to the Old or vice versa, or from the West to the East. This massive rise in exports has only been possible because of the considerable improvements in the technical quality and particularly the stability of the product sold. ‘It's a great wine to drink locally but it doesn't travel’, an often heard expression when visiting wine regions in the 1970s and 1980s, is but a distant memory today. Microfiltration and ultrafiltration using membrane technology have been important tools in ensuring clarity and stability of the product, particularly in the case of the output of large producers. Other membrane processes, including reverse osmosis (RO) have enabled producers to achieve product of reasonably consistent quality and in styles that the marketers and gatekeepers believe to be popular with a wide audience, including those who were traditionally not wine drinkers.

Several ‘new’ markets have emerged in the last decades, particularly Asian countries: in the last few years, sales in China have surpassed the wine industry's expectations, especially for so‐called ‘fine’ wines, although, at the time of writing, this market has been contracting. The interest amongst wine lovers in the qualities and differences in styles in wines produced around the world is also high, as evidenced by the proliferation of wine societies and attendance at tutored tasting and other wine events, the growth in wine ‘tourism’, and the plethora of blogs and other Internet and media discussions. Annual global wine sales are estimated to amount to 246 million hectolitres, the equivalent of nearly 33 billion 75 cl bottles [3]. The diversity of retailers selling wine, declining for many years, has recently increased. The typical consumer of everyday wines is most likely to make their purchase in a supermarket rather than in a specialist outlet, but the Internet has been the salvation of independent merchants, providing a relatively inexpensive marketing vehicle and access to a national or even international customer base. Many of these outlets offer high quality wines from small, individualistic producers and, in some cases, the production operations are ‘crowd‐funded’ by enthusiastic and loyal customers.

The quality and style of wines from any region, or any producer, however small or large, will not be totally consistent from vintage to vintage – indeed it is these variations that makes individual wines so exciting to wine lovers. In other words, the quality properties of the finished product are not precisely predictable, unlike the product of other drink production technologies [4]. There is constant debate how much winemaking is considered to be an art or science. However, there is no doubt that the use of modern winemaking techniques has led to wines moving closer in style [5], and this is decried by both passionate small producers and serious and educated wine lovers. Certainly the use of technological equipment has led to less incidences of some faults and flaws but paradoxically has also contributed to the increase in others.

Although almost all ‘fine wines’ are bottled at source (usually at the winery but sometimes elsewhere in the region of production), there has been an increase in the last decade in shipping ‘everyday wines’ in bulk and bottling at destination. In fact this was commonplace until the 1970: cheaper wines were often transported in ‘SAFRAP’ (lined mild‐steel containers) or even ships' tanks, and of course wine had been transported in barrels for many centuries. The return to bulk shipping for inexpensive wines has been largely driven by economic factors, together with the need to be seen to reduce the environmental impact of transportation. There are other pros and cons to bulk transportation, particularly from a quality perspective. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) tanks and flexitanks are the two most widely used transport containers, and wines may become tainted from poorly maintained or cleaned ISO tanks, or the ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) copolymer liner of flexitanks, although such instances are thankfully very rare. There are historic incidences of wines being tainted with naphthalene on journeys from Australia to Europe. Flexitanks may also permit some undesirable oxygen ingression, albeit at a very low level – the permeability of the material has decreased considerably since the 1990s. As flexitanks are generally ‘single‐use’, contamination from previous contents is not usually a problem, but the disposable nature perhaps does not sit well the purported environmental advantages of bulk wine shipping. A defective seal on an ISO tank or the use of a flexitank material that is highly permeable could allow oxygen ingress leading to degradation of the entire contents. Wines to be transported in bulk will require adjustment and stabilisation before their journey, and often again prior to packaging at destination – the latter operations being outside of the control of the producer, who may nevertheless bear the brunt of any fallout resulting from product deterioration, or the manifestation of faults or flaws. On the positive side, temperature variations during transport are very often less for wines in large tanks, and the standards of bottling at a dedicated plant at destination may be higher than those in some wineries.