There’s fat in your wine, but the fatty acids are the issue

Oil and water don’t mix (unless you add egg, but then you’ve got an emulsion…and mayonnaise). Wine is essentially water plus alcohol, which doesn’t mix well with oil, either. Since there’s no oil slick layer floating on top of your glass of wine the way fat drops glisten on top of a bowl of ramen, you’ve probably assumed that the wine is fat-free. And if you Google “is there fat in wine?” about 102,000,000 results will tell you that you’re right.

Which is wrong, sort of. Wine does, strictly speaking, include very small amounts of fat. New and improved chemical analyses of New Zealand sauvignon blancs have identified that they at least 25 different kinds of triacylglycerides — the chemical reference for your standard fat molecule: three fatty acids (tri-acyl) bound to a glycerol molecule (glyceride). That’s in addition to an assortment of other fat relatives such as free fatty acids and some waxes.

It’s actually the free fatty acids that are most important here. (Those fats are there in such minuscule quantities that even the jumpiest health journalist can’t pretend there’s anything to jump about there.) They’re present in milligram per liter quantities (so we’re talking less than the amount of sugar found even in truly dry wines) which is enough to make a significant sensory impact on wine indirectly. 

Yeast need lots of free fatty acids to grow well; they’re a major raw ingredient for new cell walls. With plenty of oxygen they can make their own; without oxygen, that particular yeast production line shuts down. Fermenting wine is a mostly anaerobic job for yeast: they get a little oxygen exposure at the top of the vat, a little if the wine is vigorously mixed to keep the skins submerged, but mostly need to rely on the fatty acids initially contained in the grape juice to tide them over. If that source fails, a long and very complicated chain of yeast stress response events kick in, ultimately ending in stuck fermentations, icky aromas, or both. In short, the amount and kind of fatty acids in particular and lipids in general affects wine aroma.

That’s not a wholly unheard-of problem. Overly enthusiastic efforts to clarify white juice before fermentation can pull fatty acids out, too, to the yeast’s detriment. But, ironically, the more common issue is too much of the wrong kind of fatty acid after the yeast have been at it awhile. Lacking the ability to synthesize cell wall components they really need, too much of cell wall molecules they can make (decanoic and octanoic acids) accumulate with toxic consequences. The effect fatty acids have on yeast is a bit like the effect fat has on humans: too much of the wrong kind kills us after awhile, but not enough of the right kind can cause serious problems, too.

But there’s a different and possibly more interesting point to be made here. Lipids originally present in the grape juice affect yeast metabolism, which affects wine aroma, which gives us new places to intervene to make alterations. Adding lipids to South Australian chardonnay boosted production of aromatic molecules: esters, aldehydes, higher alcohols, and volatile acids. The authors of that sauv blanc study speculate that adding specific lipids might be a way to create new, different styles of that so very identifiably aromatic wine.

This information is splendid in two ways. First, it tells us more about that complex and ill-described business of how winemaking works. Second, it may be a way to experiment with new wines. But, third, it could open up one more avenue for adding stuff to make wine fit a particular sensory profile, which we might more generally call “manipulation” and to which many of us* are generally opposed but which fuels the contemporary commercial wine-as-supermarket-commodity industry and supplies inexpensive reds and whites to fit market niche-targeted profiles specifically designed for the glasses of middle-class suburban mothers between 31 and 40 or single 22-29 condo dwellers who prefer to drink wine before dinner with friends on Thursday and watch Orange is the New Black. All wine is manipulated, all wine contains fat, but what that means for any individual case is a different question.

 

 

*Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that “us” is mostly comprised of people who prefer to drink and/or help produce unique and expressive wines that rely more for direction on local traditions, personal philosophy, and vintage conditions than Nielsen numbers.

 

Authenticating icewine: closer, if not quite close enough

Scenario #1 – You’re sitting next to your fire after dinner, relaxed, with a few ounces of fine Canadian or German icewine, maybe a few slices of blue cheese and a ripe comice pear, and the current evening reading book. You enjoy all three for an hour or so and retire, happy and sleepy, to bed.

Scenario #2 – You’re sitting next to your fire after dinner with a few ounces of icewine and an active mind in search of a target, maybe two active minds if you have a companion. Conversation turns to the wine, how desperate those first Germans must have been to salvage their inadvertently frozen grapes and how arduous and expensive repeating the process on purpose now is. You speculate that cutting real icewine with something else must be mighty tempting, and the gaze you cast on your glass turns wary. And then you cast your gaze on Google and find this new article in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture on a new strategy for testing the authenticity of icewine.

Icewine production is very expensive and no International Body of Icewine Authenticators polices producers to ensure that they’re doing it right or in good faith. Canada produces the bulk of the world’s stock (though I also enjoyed some fine examples in the Finger Lakes, not too far south of Ontario), and the Canadian Vintner’s Quality Alliance (VQA) legislates use of the term: a Canadian bottle with “icewine” or “ice wine” on the label must be made from approved varieties, from grapes harvested during “sustained” temps of at least -8°C, naturally frozen on the vine, coming in at at least 35°Brix, with no added sugar or alcohol, all overseen by a VQA representative. European producers employ similar standards, but the Asian sweet wine market is apparently well-populated with “Iced wine” and other unauthorized and fraudulent variations on the theme. Having a reliable means to verify that an “icewine” is really icewine made from frozen grapes seems prudent.

Per Armin Hermann’s new research, tracking oxygen isotopes could be that way. The idea is clever and conceptually simple. When grapes freeze, water partitions unequally between the part that turns to ice and the part that remains liquid. That’s the point of icewine: more water freezes, leaving sugars and other dissolved molecules concentrated in the syrupy liquid that remains. The naturally occurring isotope 18O, present in the water, will also distribute into the frozen and the unfrozen parts unequally. Since the frozen ice is more or less excluded from what ends up in a bottle of true icewine, then, icewines will contain a characteristic amount of 18O. All we need to do is determine — theoretically, using mathematical equations, and empirically, by measuring a bunch of icewines — what the “icewine” versus the “not icewine” 18O ranges are. Simple, elegant, and probably effective.

The plots of 18O measurements Hermann created show what looks like reasonably convincing separation between the ice- and non-icewine samples (understanding that judging how convincing is outside my expertise). BUT, there are two important caveats. First, the comparison was lab-frozen grape musts against the unfrozen originals. Again, it’s simple: “Frozen grapes, when pressed, will produce a must that is always depleted in ¹⁸O relative to its marc and also to their unfrozen counterparts.” The study didn’t include creating a database of icewine samples from various regions to establish reasonable 18O ranges. That’s solvable in theory, though the success of the whole method still depends on finding good, clear separation between real live ice and non-icewines.

Second, the method provides no way of determining how the wine was frozen. The 18O-depleted wine could have just as easily been frozen after harvest, in the winery, illegally. So, no matter how successful that empirical database is, the method won’t perfectly solve the how-do-we-detect-fakery problem. It is, as Hermann notes, an “additional” means giving a “strong indication” of authenticity. I wonder: is there a detectable chemical difference between the kind of slow freezing that would happen naturally on a grapevine in a cold Ontario winter and fast winery cryofreezing? Until then, looking for the Canadian VQA mark on the bottle — and avoiding anything labeled “iced wine” — remains the safest option, North American privilege notwithstanding.

Measuring not just tannin concentration but tannin behavior: Kennedy’s stickiness assay

Why does it always seem that we know the least about stuff that’s the most important? Tannins garner a lot of wine researcher’s attention, and for good reason. No one needs convincing about how important tannins are to wine quality (especially not the consulting companies who’ve correlated high tannin concentration with high wine magazine ratings). The amount of noise made about tannins, though, could give someone seriously inflated ideas about how well we understand them.

Excellent wine chemists are, in fact, still thinking about really good, consistently accurate, and every-day-practical ways of measuring a wine’s tannin concentration. The well-known Harbertson-Adams assay went a long way in that direction, but isn’t the last word on the topic. But just looking how much tannin a wine has doesn’t tell us enough. “Tannin” describes a whole group of molecules, and those molecules behave in different ways.

What we really need is a way of measuring not just how much tannin a wine has, but how astringent it’s likely to feel. That’s a tall order — astringency is a complicated sensation affected by alcohol concentration, sugars, polysaccharides, the person doing the tasting, and undoubtedly other factors. Just tasting the darn thing is, without question, the most elegant and reliable way to measure wine astringency. But it would still be useful to have a way of measuring the relative astringency of different types of tannins to correlate with how different production techniques affect those tannins and make some predictions. And, just as importantly, if we’re ever going to figure out what tannins do, how they behave, and how astringency works, having more tools to look at them is important.

James Kennedy’s group at Fresno State is working on a way to go beyond traditional tannin measurements, which just tell you how much tannin you have, to develop analyses to tell you what the tannin you have does and how it’s likely to produce astringency. More particularly, they’ve developed a way to measure the stickiness of any particular type of tannin molecule. Stickiness, as defined in the article, is “the observed variation in the enthalpy of interaction between tannin and a hydrophobic surface.” Or, to put it a lot more simply, stickiness describes how strongly a tannin is inclined to attach itself to something else (without actually reacting with it). This seems pretty commonsensical — if we sense astringency when tannins glom together with our salivary proteins, then we’d like to know how glom-inclined those tannins are. They’ve shown that their stickiness measurement for a particular set of wine tannins remains constant no matter how much of the tannin you test — in other words, they can measure stickiness as a tannin quality, not tannin quantity.

It’s a trickier puzzle than it might seem. How do you measure how tightly two molecules are holding on to each other? And when you’re interested in how different tannins interact with proteins, which are themselves a very diverse group of molecules, how do you choose which protein is going to be the protein that represents all other proteins?

For Kennedy and company, the solution involved choosing something that isn’t a protein at all but polystyrene divinylbenzene, a polymeric resin that holds on to tannin in remarkably the same way as the specific amino acid (proline) that acts as the tannin-attractant in salivary proteins. The resin allows for a standardized stickiness measurement and no doubt has all sorts of advantages in terms of working with it in the lab. It won’t actually behave like real salivary proteins which, being folded up into various shapes with proline more or less accessible along their various crannies, don’t bind tannins in ways so predictable. The upshot is that this is a standardized measure of stickiness (a defined scientific parameter), not an actual measure of astringency (a subjective sensation). Nevertheless, stickiness values and astringency should be related in predictable ways. We’ll very likely see a publication verifying that relationship with human tasters before too long.

Stickiness assessment involve some fairly complex chromatography, improving on a method the lab published last year. The methodological details are less important than realizing that this isn’t something that even a well-equipped winery lab is going to be able to do on their own (unlike that Harbertson-Adams assay, which is pretty accessible for a lot of winemakers). Though some wineries may measure tannin concentrations with that Harbertson-Adams assay, which is pretty accessible for a lot of winemakers, stickiness measurements aren’t going to become the new best thing in figuring out how long your syrah needs to spend on its skins before being pressed off. Too expensive (the chromatography columns needed for this kind of work run hundreds of dollars each), too training-intensive (unless you have a chemistry grad student hanging out in your winery), and too little of an improvement over just tasting the darn thing. This research isn’t likely to change the way anyone makes wine tomorrow or even for the next year or two. But it very well may change the way scientists study and think about tannins, the kinds of questions they can answer — those tricky issues around the relative astringency of various seed and skin tannins, for example — and what they can tell winemakers about targeting specific wine styles a few years down the road. And that’s worth making some noise over.