Uncorking the Truth: Can Wine Be an Ultra-Processed Food? Part 1
What’s actually in that bottle of wine – grapes, yeast and sulfites? The reality may surprise you—part 1 of a 3-part series. There’s been a lot of discussion around wine and health, so I decided to kick off the New Year—and Dry January—with a few posts at the intersection of wine and wellness.
Rippon Vineyard: Probably the most beautiful winery setting in the world.
Source: Coppiera Travel Archives
This reference is going to make me feel old, but do you remember the I Love Lucy episode (fast forward to 1:23) where Lucy is in a giant vat, stomping grapes to make wine? The scene devolves into a goopy wrestling match, but for a long time, that was my idea of wine’s origin story.
When I began taking a deeper dive into the wine world, I stumbled across a viticultural textbook called Sunlight into Wine. It's a dry read, but the idea that bright golden photons could transmute into something tangible I can see, touch, and save to drink another day? It's all very romantic. I started visiting wineries to learn more about specific wines, and everyone spoke breezily about the land, the climate, and the geographic factors that shaped the vines—and how those forces were somehow sublimated into the soul of the wine through the grapes. Naturally, I loved it.
Then I took my first job in the wine industry working for a custom-crush operation, and all that romance evaporated. Unlike beer, every year you’ve got one shot to cut a bunch of grapes off the vines, not wash them, and smoosh them into a delightful drink after letting a bunch of microbes go wild in the vat. Harvest is also more like being at a high school car wash, where you spend 90% of the time hosing down the press, sorting line, picking bins, and fermenting vats, and when that’s over, mopping the floors. It turns out there’s a lot that can go wrong in making wine, so everything has to be sparkling clean. There’s a lot of money on the line, so naturally, the smart people out there have created ways to subvert nature when it goes wrong, which means there is a lot that can go into wine. Enough to be categorized as an ultra-processed food? In some cases, yes.
What are ultra-processed foods (UPF)?
Ultra-processed foods are not merely processed foods; they are industrially formulated products engineered to be convenient, hyper-palatable, and shelf-stable. Think of the difference between homemade bread and Wonder Bread.
How do you explain why two foods with nearly identical macronutrients can have very different health effects? The Nova system is one way. Source: The Internet
This system was codified in the Nova Food Classification System, developed by Dr. Carlos Monteiro and researchers at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Nova has been widely adopted by major public-health institutions, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and a broad range of nutrition researchers. In other words, a lot of smart people see eye to eye on this system—but read on if you’re skeptical, so we can find out where we disagree.
The core idea behind Nova is that how food is processed matters as much as the nutrients it contains. Here is a quick rundown, or you can click here for a more detailed explanation.
- Nova 1: Unprocessed or minimally processed natural foods. Foods in their natural state or slightly altered (cleaned, cut, pasteurized) without added substances.
- Examples: Fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, raw meat, milk, water
- Nova 2: Processed Culinary Ingredients. Substances extracted from Group 1 foods (like oils, sugar, salt) or derived from nature (like butter) used in cooking.
- Examples: Oils, fats, sugar, salt
- Nova 3: Processed foods. Foods made by combining Group 1 and Group 2 items, with added salt, sugar, or fats for preservation or flavor.
- Examples: Canned vegetables (in brine/syrup), simple cheeses, freshly made bread, cured meats
- Nova 4: Ultra-processed foods. Industrial formulations with many additives, often using substances not used in home cooking, with complex ingredient lists.
- Examples: Soft drinks, sugary cereals, packaged snacks, margarine, instant noodles, chicken nuggets.
Let’s take a brief detour, because I don’t want to sound alarmist about this UPF thing. Nova is one way of sorting the food world, not a final verdict on what anyone should eat. As anyone who has ever tried to organize a child’s playroom knows, classification depends on intent. Does a dinosaur-shaped car belong with the Matchbox cars, or in the dinosaur bin? The answer depends on what question you’re trying to answer.
Is it a car or a dinosaur? Source: The Internet
What the Nova system does particularly well is explain why two foods with nearly identical macronutrients can have very different health effects—say, homemade bread, a processed food in the Nova 3 category since it contains flour, water, salt, and yeast, versus industrially produced bread, a UPF in the Nova 4 category since it contains ingredients like dough conditioners, emulsifiers, flour treatment agents, color enhancers, preservatives, and vitamins.
A large and growing body of research shows that frequent consumption of Nova Group 4 foods—ultra-processed foods—is associated with higher rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, depression, cardiovascular disease, and, most unsettling of all, increased all-cause mortality across multiple countries and populations. These findings are observational, which means they establish correlation rather than causation, but the consistency of the signal across populations is hard to ignore.
That said, Nova’s categories can be fuzzy. Like the dinosaur car, some foods sit awkwardly between bins. Is protein-fortified yogurt really in the same category as soda? Under Nova, yes—even though most people would intuitively distinguish between them. Nova also focuses on how foods are made rather than what nutrients they contain. It’s entirely possible to meet recommended nutrient intakes while still eating a diet high in ultra-processed foods.
Other classification systems attempt to resolve these tensions by incorporating nutrient density or food quality, but evaluating them would take us too far afield. If you reject the premise that wine could ever be considered ultra-processed, those frameworks may feel more comfortable. For this discussion, I’m using Nova not as a moral cudgel, but as a tool for asking better questions about what happens to food—and wine—between the romance of the vineyard and the practical reality of the wine in the bottle.
Okay, rant over. Let’s talk about winemaking—and all the things that can go wrong, and how they’re “fixed.”
The primary ingredient in wine is grapes, but if you’ve ever tried fermenting grocery-store grapes (table grapes), you may have been disappointed with the results. The magic of wine grapes lies in their structure: they are smaller, with thicker skins and a higher skin-to-pulp ratio (see photo below). Most contain seeds and are both very sweet and high in acidity.
Left: Table Grapes, Right: Wine Grapes. Source: The Internet
Table grapes, by contrast, are larger because they contain more water, have thinner skins, and are usually seedless. No one wants to snack on sour, tannic table grapes—but those very traits are what make wine grapes so well suited to making wine. A beverage made from table grapes tends to have less flavor, less color, lower alcohol, and a flatter profile due to reduced acidity.
This is why wineries love to say that wine quality is entirely determined by grape quality and all the “blah blah blah” about how the land influences the unique snowflake, which is this winery’s wines. That’s broadly true—but in practice, there are ways to intervene. So what if you don’t have the perfect grapes?
How Homer Takes Over America. Source: The Simpsons
If a growing season is cold or otherwise difficult and vines fail to receive enough sunlight to accumulate sufficient sugar by harvest, enrichment may be legally permitted in many cooler wine regions worldwide, particularly in Europe and North America. It’s mostly prohibited in warm-climate regions, but it’s like Texas Penal Code § 21.06 — it’s on the books but largely unenforceable since it’s impossible to know what is happening behind closed doors.
Enrichment allows a wine to reach an adequate alcohol level and can contribute to overall stability, body, and extraction of flavor compounds, but in this case it is not intended to add sweetness. We’ll cover that later. Wineries may enrich wine using sugars such as sucrose, glucose, or dextrose. In many regions, producers may also use concentrated grape must (CGM) or rectified concentrated grape must (RCGM). These are industrially produced, sugar-rich liquids made by removing water from grape juice—typically through vacuum evaporation or reverse osmosis—to concentrate sugars and solids. CGM retains some grape flavor and color, while RCGM is highly purified to provide a neutral, colorless sugar source.
Where allowed, most wine regions strictly regulate enrichment, specifying where it is permitted, when it may be used, which substances are allowed, and how much alcohol it may add. In case you think this only affects low-end, mass-market grocery store wines—you know, wines where the influence of the land doesn't matter—even top domaines in highly prized regions like Burgundy have had to consider enrichment in challenging vintages such as 2021. Here is an incredibly well-written and honest assessment of the 2021 vintage. The very quality that makes wine unique—its ability to transmit the conditions of a single year—is also its vulnerability.
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Let’s leave it here for now. We’ve covered a lot of ground, and there’s still more to unpack—no need to rush or turn this into a marathon read. Next time, we’ll dive into wines with added residual sugar, acidity, color, texture, stabilizers, and artificial flavors. In the final post, we’ll bring everything together and examine if wine looks more like an ultra-processed food—and whether it’s closer to soda or fortified yogurt.
