02/05/08 New Laws in the EU

Welcome to Vine to Wine this is your host Linda Moran. The twenty seven nation European Community is in a pickle. The wine sector of the economies is over producing and which causes excess subsidies and a burden on the budget. Their solution? Why ban sugar additives to wine of course! What do I mean by that? Well on today's program we will discuss one of Europe's little winemaking secrets. In the cooler wine producing regions of mainly northern Europe the climate does not allow the grapes to completely ripen and without the natural sugars to produce wine the producers add what they refer to as their liquid sunshine. It is the addition of sugar or juice concentrate. This is a practice done mostly by large scale low end mass market wine producers and is not at all the practice of the finer German winemakers where the situation is actually attention to sugar levels creating the direct correlation to the style of wine being made. But an article I read recently claims over production by those mass market producers adding sugar is causing a heavy burden on the government budget, because so much of the production is subsidized. Apparently the EU Farm Commissioner stated that 700 million dollars of the one point 9 million dollar budget was spent trying to get rid of unwanted wine. Tomorrow we will discuss the process known as chaptalization or adding sugar during the winemaking process. Remember to send your wine questions to Linda at vine to wine dot net and thank you for joining me on today's Vine to Wine.