Channel 4 said much supermarket wine is like alcoholic cola and contains fish

tobiascurious

Was there ever a thread on this? I'm interested in how people choose the wines which don't come under this category.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/episode-guide/series-29/episode-1

"The health benefits of the occasional glass of red wine are widely-acknowledged but Dispatches reveals how a great deal of the wine we consume is enhanced, sweetened or flavoured, creating a drink that one critic describes as no better than, 'an alcoholic cola'."

Gingernutmeg

I haven't seen the programme but most wine contains 'fish' in the sense that wine is clarified using isinglass, which comes from the swim bladders of sturgeon. That's why a lot of wine isn't suitable for strict vegetarians. It's not really shocking news though, it's been used for hundreds of years.

Bongedone

I used to make homebrew beer and you could also use the finings in that.

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finings

You would also have to stop drinking beer and various fruit juices.

Vegan wine is a way of avoiding the animal products.

PasturesNew

Gingernutmeg wrote: »

I haven't seen the programme but most wine contains 'fish' in the sense that wine is clarified using isinglass, which comes from the swim bladders of sturgeon. That's why a lot of wine isn't suitable for strict vegetarians. It's not really shocking news though, it's been used for hundreds of years.

Bumping this for vegetarians ... I do love to see pain
Although you knew that ... many veggies won't... so let's spread the joy.

paulwf

tobiascurious wrote: »

I'm interested in how people choose the wines which don't come under this category.

The main factor is that duty is charged at £1.61 per bottle of wine regardless of its retail price. So, a cheap bottle has a large chunk of the cost swallowed up by the duty. See the table halfway down this page:

http://www.thirtyfifty.co.uk/spotlight-wine-pricing.asp

You can see that for a £4 a bottle, wine the winemaker has 0.25p (*note - I assume they mean £0.25*) to grow the grapes, make and bottle the wine. To produce wines on the scale required to be profitable requires a total focus on costs and producing large volumes of cheap grapes.

At a retail price of £5 a bottle, wine the winemaker receives around £0.94. This is over twice the amount for a £4 a bottle. At around £5 the grower can afford to manage the grapes in the yard to a high standard. Generally the fruit concentration is the big improvement by growing fewer grapes on the vines (low yield). You can usually taste this by the flavours lingering for a while after swallowing the wine and some styles start to become weightier in the mouth. This is a great entry point to start drinking well-made wine.

Between £7 & £12 the wine's concentration continues to improve, but also more flavours start to appear. Either through the use of oak barrels (adding 50p / bottle in costs) to impart toasty vanilla flavours, or perhaps the soil where the grapes are grown has unusual minerals that give the wine a unique flavour. Wines at this price point can benefit by ageing, helping develop more unusual flavours. All these extra flavours are said to add complexity to the wine.

The average for all bottles of wine purchased in the UK is £4.26...as that is an average for every £10 bottle purchased there most be some really cheap bottles of paint stripper to balance it out!

From trying different wine price bands at M&S (I work there as a general customer assistant but try and take an interest in what I sell) for me the magic price point is £6.50, by comparison many of the £5 wines are drinable but don't really stand out...there are of course some exceptions. I just wait until they are on offer and pay around £4.50...the same applies to other supermarkets I expect, just be wary of new wines in certain chains where they have thought of an inflated rrp then magically sell it at half price.