Powdered wine - how to distinguish it from the real one? Powder wine. Truth and myth How to distinguish grape wine from powder

I love wine. I probably don’t know much about it, but I prefer wine to stronger drinks. Dry no, I don't like it, if only for a change. But the dessert wines are the best.

Buying inexpensive Russian-made wine, buyers are often interested in whether it is "powdered" or not. Let's figure out where the legend of "powdered wine" came from and how true it is.

Usually, "powder" is considered to be cheap wine produced by a Russian manufacturer little known to the general public. It is understood that in its production, instead of fermenting grape must, a kind of "wine powder" is used, which is diluted with water with the addition of alcohol. Concerning the composition of this powder, opinions differ: according to optimists, "wine powder" is made by evaporating grape juice and is a generally natural product. Pessimists are sure that it is made by mixing sugar, citric acid, food coloring and all kinds of flavorings.

How true is this legend and what is it based on? Firstly, after the collapse of the USSR, most wine-growing regions - Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia - ended up outside Russia. Although in recent years, domestic viticulture and winemaking has been developing very actively, which is facilitated by government support measures, until now, wine produced in Russia from grapes grown here covers only about 30% of the market's needs. About the same amount or slightly less is accounted for by bottled imports - but imported wines are significantly more expensive and far from affordable for all consumers.

The remaining market share is occupied by Russian-made wines (and according to the law, the bottling line is considered the place of production of an alcoholic beverage), which are made from imported wine materials purchased in different countries and imported into the country in bulk tanks - in the slang of winemakers, these wine materials are called bulk.

The term "wine material" means dry wine intended for subsequent further processing. In the simplest case, it is simply bottled and put on sale, but it can be blended, i.e. mixing different varieties to get a more interesting bouquet, aging in oak barrels or subjecting them to champagne - almost all inexpensive sparkling wines produced in Russia are made from the beam.

Most of these wines are produced at little-known wineries located near large cities - during the Soviet industrialization, they were placed closer to consumers and skilled labor, and raw materials could be imported from any region.

Most of these wines are of quite acceptable quality, although claims against them are still not uncommon. The fact is that the bulk, as a rule, is purchased on the spot market, where it turns up cheaper, one batch from Spain - the other from Chile or Moldova. Therefore, there are frequent cases when, when trying to buy the wine he likes, the buyer encounters a drink that is completely different in taste from him - although it is bottled in exactly the same bottle. On the back label, on the reverse side, you can read the inscription in small print: "Produced from dry wine material."

A person who is far from familiar with the intricacies of winemaking technologies immediately comes to mind a certain concentrate powder - although at the same time, reading the inscription "dry wine" on the label, he does not expect at all that there will be some kind of "powder" under the cork. This is one of the reasons for the legend of "powdered wine".

There is another. In the 90s, in the markets of coastal resort villages in the Crimea, on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, in the southern regions of Ukraine, semi-underground trade in cheap "homemade wine" in plastic bottles was very widespread. Sometimes it really was a simple home-made "dry", but very often enterprising merchants simply took a dry concentrate popular in those days like "Invite" or "Yuppi" and diluted it with water and vodka.

The resulting liquid was not wine in any way - in modern terms, it was a typical surrogate - but it was moderately sweet, moderately sour and contained alcohol. Among inexperienced vacationers, who were primarily interested in the alcohol content, and not in taste and aroma, these surrogates, due to their cheapness, diverged with a bang. And the whole local district knew that "Baba Manya drives wine from powder."

Actually, these two very real reasons, bizarrely combined in the mass consciousness, gave rise to the myth of "powdered wine". And to what extent is it possible and realistic to produce wine - real wine, and not a surrogate - from any "dry concentrates"? After all, they use concentrated juices delivered from exotic countries for the production of juices and nectars? ..

Firstly, the cost of one liter of imported wine material is about $0.6–0.8, or about 40–50 rubles for our money, but in some cases (low quality, excess harvest, etc.) it can turn out to be much more below. It makes no economic sense for manufacturers to bother with "evaporation" and subsequent "recovery". The costs of "production" of such wine are reduced in the simplest case to bottling and labeling, and are more than recouped even in the lowest-budget segment.

Defective wine material, which has obvious flaws in taste and aroma and is unsuitable for direct bottling, can be purchased even cheaper. To correct the taste, sweeteners (usually ordinary sugar), acidity regulators (citric acid) and other ingredients are added to it. Often the content of the original wine material in such a drink is only 50% of the volume.

The law does not allow the resulting product to be called wine, and it is labeled as a "wine drink" - on the shelf of chain stores, such liquor can be found in paper bags at a price of about 100 rubles per liter, if not cheaper. For health, it is completely safe, but there is no need to talk about any taste qualities. Such products also find their consumer among hunters for a cheap degree.

At the same time, the level of state control over the alcohol industry in Russia today is extremely high, and none of the legal producers will risk an expensive license for a penny profit. Than to be chemical with "powders", it is much easier to drive cheap shmurdyak absolutely legally by writing "wine drink" on the label.

There is another point - technological. In the process of making wine, during yeast fermentation, not only the natural grape sugar contained in the must is converted into alcohol, but also many other chemical processes. As a result, natural wine - whether good or bad - does not taste like grape juice at all. And making "wine" by adding water and alcohol to grape juice concentrate - whether it's dry or pasty - is impossible. You can easily see this for yourself: take a bag of grape juice, add some vodka to it and try it. You will get vodka with grape juice, and the resulting "cocktail" will turn out to be completely different from wine.

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• With preservatives: wine made according to the "accelerated" technology, with salicylic acid in its composition to prevent souring.
• Mixture: a blend of low-quality and good wine to give the drink a more acceptable smell and taste.
• Tinted: a mixture of wines with the addition of dyes (not always natural) to achieve the desired color.
• Substitution: low-quality wine with the substitution of labels, corks, excises.
• Camouflage: pouring low-quality wine into part of a batch of a well-known brand.

What to look out for

In the shop:

• Obviously, but still to clarify: wines in boxes are of poor quality. Normal wine is never stored in this form.
• The sugar content in wine should be as follows: in dry wines - up to 4 g/l; in semi-dry - up to 18 g / l; in semi-sweet - up to 45 g / l, in sweet - at least 45 g / l. If there is more sugar and the label does not say that the wine is fortified, then it was added artificially.
• If salicylic acid is present in the wine, then the wine is made with. But the scary ingredient E220 (sulfur dioxide) will be present in any wine, as it is a natural by-product of fermentation.

• The date of manufacture must be stamped separately from the main information on the label. All fonts must be clear, without typos, blurs, printing defects. The inscription on the label must match the inscription on the cork.
• Vintage (and therefore infused in oak barrels) wine powder does not happen. As well as artificial dry. This is because it is cheaper and easier to make a sweet concentrate that is roughly similar to the taste of wine.
• If you are a connoisseur of a certain brand of wine, then you should be wary of changing the original bottle (asymmetrical, branded) to a regular one.

Houses:

• When you add a pinch of regular baking soda, natural wine will change its color due to the reaction with grape starch. Synthetic will remain the same.
• When adding a few drops of glycerin to natural wine, it will sink to the bottom and not change its color. If the glycerin changes color to yellow or red, then you have a powdered wine.
• When shaking the bottle in a good drink, the foam will gather in the center and fall off fairly quickly. In a low-quality product, the foam will collect at the edges and will slowly settle.
• Drop wine on a regular piece of chalk. If the stain brightens after drying, the wine is natural. If the stain has changed color, it contains dyes.

Your "chemical" experiments will be a spectacle for the guests who brought the wine. But, believe me, it's better to laugh healthy at the eccentricity of a friend than to curse the ill-fated cookie, which has poisoned everyone.

Often in stores, instead of real grape wine, they offer not very high-quality powdered drinks. They are made from evaporated grape must, adding flavors, flavor enhancers and other ingredients. It is difficult to call the liquid obtained in this way a useful and really tasty drink.

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How to identify powdered wine in a store

You can distinguish real wine from a fake even before purchasing it. First of all, you should look at the price of the drink. The lower it is, the more likely it is powdered wine. The fact is that growing grapes is not cheap, not to mention its processing, storage and transportation of the drink. Of course, producers will not sell their products at a loss, so high-quality, good wines are expensive.

Unfortunately, even the purchase of a drink at a high price does not guarantee that you have protected yourself from counterfeiting. Some sellers deliberately raise the price to convince the buyer of the impeccable quality of the goods.

Powdered wines are almost always sold in cardboard boxes. Natural, high-quality drinks are stored in glass bottles. The cheaper the container, the higher the chance that it contains a base drink.

Particular attention should be paid to the shade of the liquid. Natural wines tend to have a pleasant soft color. Powder, on the contrary, are often too bright, unnatural. However, only cheap and very low-quality fakes can be distinguished by this feature.

Consider another important point: when buying fortified and dessert wines, it is easy to run into a fake, so their choice should be treated with special attention. Dry wines, on the other hand, are more difficult to counterfeit because they contain less sugar, which means it is too difficult to overcome the characteristic chemical flavor.

The difference between powdered wine and natural

If you have already bought wine, try to determine whether it is natural or powdered by taste and aroma. In artificial drinks, the smell is often too sharp, too pronounced. This is especially easy to notice for those who have already tried high-quality natural drinks.

What could be worse than the collapsed expectations from this or that product (drink), especially if it also cost a lot of money? This is exactly what can happen if you do not know how to identify powdered wine according to various characteristics (external, taste, chemical). After all, modern producers have learned how to make a special concentrate, from which they then make wine that has nothing to do with natural.

What is powdered wine

How do you get a drink for which you do not need to grow grapes at all? For him, you just need to purchase a special concentrate made anywhere, dilute it with drinking water, pour in a certain amount of alcohol, and add flavorings.

The concentrate itself is made from evaporated grape must. Any material can be taken as a basis, even very poor quality, because producers only evaporate the must that is not suitable for good wine.

So it turns out an artificial mixture, a surrogate. If initially harmful and dangerous substances were not used in the manufacture, then the drink cannot bring harm, but also benefits, since vitamins and substances that make wine a useful product are lost.

I must say that many people like these drinks much more than natural wine, because it is easier to regulate their taste during mixing. This is how fragrant and very tasty wines are obtained, but they have nothing to do with the real product.

Myths about Powdered Wine

Of course, there are drinks that are made from dry concentrate, but there are not so many of them. Usually the manufacturer makes a concentrate from a failed batch of grape must so as not to lose his money, and then puts it on a new drink, but not wine.

And the term “powder wine” itself came to us from our post-Soviet past, when various additives and concentrates in powder form were used to produce such alcoholic beverages (but the base was always grape and liquid).

And now many consumers of the post-Soviet space say about cheap wines that they are made from powder. In fact, flavorings, sweeteners (this happens especially often with “half wines”), and colorants can be added to them.

How to determine: natural or powdered wine

There are methods for determining real wine from powdered wine. Of course, most of them can only be used on the liquid itself, so it is quite difficult to do this at the time of purchase. But if you are careful, you can try.

Drink price

This is perhaps the most important thing to pay attention to in the first place. If a bottle of wine is very cheap, then you probably have some kind of surrogate in front of you. After all, to make good wine, considerable funds are required, which are not needed at all when mixing powder with alcohol.

Appearance of the wine

Pay attention to the label. On a bottle of natural wine, it must be indicated that the product is natural. If there are no indications, then the wine most likely contains a concentrate. Sometimes powdered wines are labeled as special. By the way, buying wine in glass containers, you can protect yourself from fake.

If you choose vintage wine, then it cannot be powdered, because the vintage year is necessarily indicated on the label. Aged wines can also be attributed to natural drinks.

The taste and smell of the drink

It is very difficult to fake dry wine, as it has almost no other smell than wine. Other drinks are more aromatic, so they are much easier to fake. When testing the drink, there should not be a chemical and strong “fusel” taste and smell.

It is recommended to develop taste memory and use natural wines. Having tried such a high-quality product several times, various fakes will be recognized very quickly, because a surrogate cannot replace the taste of real wine.

How to identify real wine from powder: “chemical studies”

There are several ways to determine the quality of wine after opening the bottle.

• Take a small bottle and pour wine into it. Close the neck of the vial with your finger, turn it over and lower it into the water. Remove your finger. If the wine is of high quality and there are no impurities in it, then it will not mix with water. If the opposite is true, then after a while the water will turn into the color of the drink.
• For the next test, you need glycerin. Pour about 100 ml of wine into a container, add 20 ml of glycerin. In a natural drink, glycerin will not change color, but in a surrogate it can become yellow, red or purple.
• After opening the bottle, shake the wine and immediately pour into the glass. Look at how foam is formed. In high-quality wine, it will appear only in the center and quickly settle. If you have a surrogate in front of you, then the foam will stay on the edges of the glass for a long time.

How to distinguish homemade wine from powder

Going on vacation to warmer climes, many holidaymakers try local wines that craftsmen make at home. But as practice shows, a second-rate and low-quality product is usually put up for sale, and the best is kept for themselves. How to determine homemade wine from powdered wine and not get into a mess?

In most cases, during the sale, homemade wine is given to potential buyers to taste. But even here it can be very difficult when the drink has a bright aroma and taste. Therefore, many residents of resort areas do not recommend buying anything on the way to the beach.

If you want good wine, then you can ask the owner of the hotel or house where you live. When a person is interested in annual customers and a good reputation, he will not cheat. Perhaps even he himself makes this divine drink.

Now you know how to identify powdered wine. But I would like to note that many consumers greatly exaggerate the amount of alcohol produced from powder. To evaporate the must, such technologies are used that it is easier for producers to get low-quality and cheap wine material than to buy powder. With homemade wine, this is completely impossible, since the costs will be simply sky-high. Therefore, carefully read the labels and choose only trusted brands of alcoholic beverages.

True connoisseurs of wine are often also bold explorers: the search for new flavors and aromas leads them not only to wine boutiques or wine departments of supermarkets, but also to small shops, markets and even to private drink producers. We have already written about how. However, unfortunately, when searching, there is still a risk of buying unnatural powdered wine - a surrogate of water and vodka or alcohol with sugar, flavorings and citric acid, or in general a mixture of alcohol, water and a powdered drink like Yuppie. If you bought wine, the naturalness of which you doubt, then you can check the drink in one of several ways that we will tell you about today.

Trust your taste and sense of smell

Too pronounced sourness or cloying sweetness should alert. The chemical smell and taste, as well as the aroma of a plum, apple or other product, interrupting all other smells in the bouquet, are almost 100% signs of a fake.

Sediment is good

In a bottle of wine, especially with old wine, the so-called "tartar" is often found - a sediment in the form of small crystals at the bottom. Sometimes the wine has a sediment that looks like gray flakes. In the first case, the sediment indicates the high quality of the drink. In the second case, it is used yeast and can spoil the taste, so the wine should be poured into another container as soon as possible to get rid of them. In any case, the sediment indicates the naturalness of the drink.

Important: there is no inverse relationship - a fine wine, young or old, may not have sediment at all.

Testing with soda, glycerin, water

The easiest way to check the quality of wine is to pour 10-20 grams of the drink into a glass and add a pinch of ordinary soda there. The fruit starch in real wine will react with the soda, which will change the color of the drink - it can take on shades of gray, blue or greenish tones. Synthetic “wine” will not change color.

Glycerin is also easy to use - just drop it into the tested drink. Drops should settle to the bottom without changing color. If the glycerin turns yellow or red, then the wine is not natural.

Testing with water is a little more laborious, but water is usually always at hand. So, you need to pour the wine into a small bottle with a narrow neck - so that it is easy to pinch it with your finger. Then lower the vial closed with your finger into a large mug, saucepan or other deep container of water. We remove the finger in the water and turn the bottle over. If the resulting drink does not mix with water, it is natural. If mixed - respectively, unnatural, or at least contains dyes, flavors or other additives.

"Lady's Legs"

If you rotate and tilt a glass with natural wine in different directions, streaks usually remain on its walls, the so-called “wine legs” or “lady's legs”. They can be thicker if the wine is relatively young, and quite thin in older wine. As a rule, the more they stick to the walls of the glass, the better the wine. Powdered drink "ladies' legs" on the glass does not leave.

Help of "winged testers"

A peculiar, but, according to those who tried it, an effective way. True, it can only be used in the warm season. So, a small amount of the drink should simply be left in a glass, on a saucer or in another wide container. In a couple of hours, or even earlier, fruit flies will fly to natural wine - small fruit flies, which can often be observed next to fermented fruits. Powdered wine does not attract fruit flies.

"Made from dry wine material"

Such an inscription often misleads wine lovers. Indeed, it can be assumed that wine is made from powder. In fact, it means that the wine is made from wine material that is not intended to create sweet wines, “fermented to dry” as winemakers say. Evaporating grapes to a state of powder, and then making “wine” from this powder is too laborious and unprofitable for dishonest people. Although the so-called “wine drinks” are indeed made from natural grape powder, the inscription on the label usually warns about this, and besides, the share of these drinks on the market is small.

In conclusion, I would like to say that unnatural powdered wine is, fortunately, a rarity. More often you can be disappointed by buying simply tasteless or low-quality, but completely natural wine. It’s also unpleasant, but at least without the risk of poisoning with “twist”. Buy wines in trusted places; give preference to dry wines, as they are the most difficult to fake; do not be tempted by a drink with a suspiciously low price, an unnatural color or in a sloppy bottle - this way you minimize the risk of buying a fake. We wish you only pleasant finds in the search for interesting wines!