This past holiday season was one of extreme revelry, and come New Year’s Day my cloudy head was full of resolve. I determined to lay off the sauce for a while, believing excessive consumption to be the only explanation as to why I kept waking up feeling like a bunch of rambunctious little people were playing grab-ass behind my eyeballs. Obviously I’d been overdoing it, and needed to get things under control. Or so I thought.
A week later, I discovered the actual culprit behind my delirium tremens. Turns out, the problem wasn’t me going out and recklessly drinking more alcohol than usual, the problem was that my usual alcohol intake had been purposely manipulated by a host of unscrupulous vintners.
According to an article titled “The Big Wine Lie” by Roberto Ferdman of The Washington Post, a staggering number of wineries are under-reporting alcohol content on their wines labels, often by as much as 1.5 percentage points.
And the crazy part is, it’s totally legal.
“In the United States, wines with 14 percent alcohol by volume or less are allowed to have a range of 1.5 percentage points from the amount stated on the bottle,” Ferdman reported. “In Australia and New Zealand, it's 1.5 percentage points, too. And in Europe, the permitted range is half a percentage point, which is about as stringent as it gets.”
Ferdman advances a number of theories as to what’s driving the legerdemain, from evolving consumer tastes to global warming and the rising heat index. Whatever the reason, many winemakers “don't appear to want to let consumers know about the trend. In fact, they seem to be going out of their way to conceal it. The analysis uncovered a sizable discrepancy between the alcohol content reported on bottles and the actual alcohol amount observed during testing, largely due to systemic underreporting.”
To be clear, 1.5 percentage points is substantial and can have seriously deleterious ramifications to the unsuspecting consumer. Let’s say you’ve got a blind date. You’re a little nervous, so you decide to have a little wine to loosen up beforehand. Nothing crazy. Let’s just say, oh, two bottles of California Cabernet alleged to be 13.5% alcohol by volume. Ah, but thanks to a little white lie — or, in this case, a red one — you unknowingly wind up drinking the equivalent of three bottles of wine. So instead of being your normal two-bottle-buzz charming self, you wind up behaving like Justin Bieber on his birthday, completely humiliating yourself in front of your blind date... who, I should add, turned out to be Taylor Swift. You can guess what happened next. That’s right, she wrote a song about what an asshole you were to her on that date, and now you’re the most hated man in the Western Hemisphere. And all because winemakers are legally allowed to lie to you.
So put that in your Reidel and drink it.
Dan’s latest book, "American Wino: A Tale of Reds, Whites and One Man’s Blues” is available on Amazon.com, Harpercollins.com and other online retailers. Follow him on Twitter @TheImbiber
