Engineered in the Cellar: The Industrial Side of Modern Wine Part 2

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. This is part 2 of a 3-part series. If you haven’t read Part 1 of this series, you might want to start there.

Welcome back. In Part 1, we ended with enrichment or chaptalization—the practice of adding sugar to grape must before or during fermentation to raise a wine’s final alcohol level.

In this context, sugar isn’t added to make wine sweet. Its role is pragmatic: it can make wine drinkable from a cool or under-ripe vintage. When used judiciously, chaptalization is essentially undetectable—even to very experienced tasters.

Wine Has Grapes?, image generated by ChatGPT (OpenAI), January 30, 2026. Prompt: "Cartoon of woman tasting wine".

COMMON ADDITIVES

I spent a long time thinking about how to approach this section. A pages-long detour into winemaking chemistry helps no one, so instead I’ve summarized some of the most commonly used wine additives below.

For clarity, when I refer to additives, I mean authorized substances intentionally added during winemaking to preserve, stabilize, or modify a wine’s chemical or sensory properties—and which remain in the wine until it’s consumed.

A few substances here sometimes fall under the category of processing aids. I’ll leave a deeper dive on those distinctions for a separate post.

This chart shows that modern winemaking uses a toolbox of additives designed to solve a specific technical problem be it stability, microbial control, acidity balance, texture, color, or consistency. Most of these substances are not about creating flavor from scratch, but about preserving, correcting, or standardizing what’s already there. Importantly, these additives fall along a spectrum of intent—from broadly accepted, traditional interventions to more overt forms of industrial formulation.

Preservation and stability come first

Several additives, notably sulfur dioxide, ascorbic acid, sorbate, and DMDC, exist primarily to prevent oxidation, control yeast and bacteria, and ensure wines remain stable from bottling to consumption, no matter how long that takes. These are largely invisible to the drinker, except for sulfites which are always on the label.

Acidity

Additives like tartaric acid and citric acid show that a wine’s balance is not always a direct expression of the vineyard. Acid management is a common corrective practice, especially in warm or difficult vintages.

Texture and mouthfeel

Substances such as gum arabic and mannoproteins demonstrate that smoothness, body, and even perceived sweetness can be enhanced without adding sugar. These additives don’t create new flavors, but they do reshape how wine feels on the palate.

Color, structure, and alcohol

Ingredients like MegaPurple, tannin powders, and RCGM/CGM can sometimes go beyond correction and into standardization and style shaping. They are used to deepen color, add body, adjust alcohol, or make wines more uniform year to year—often without consumer visibility.

Some “additives” function more like technical tools

Items such as pectinolytic enzymes and lysozyme are included even though they’re sometimes classified as processing aids. Their role is largely functional—improving extraction, clarification, or microbial control—rather than sensory enhancement.

Chart 1: Common Additives Source: Understanding Wine Technology by David Bird; Google; Coppiera.

PHYSICAL PROCESSES

There are also a host of other interventions that can be applied to wine at an industrial scale. The physical processes shown in the chart below rely on large, expensive equipment and require trained specialists to operate. Strictly speaking, they don’t belong in this discussion, since they don’t materially change the formulation of the wine.

I include them anyway because their use represents a philosophical departure from the idea that wine is simply grapes, yeast, and sulfites. Even when nothing new is added, these techniques reflect a shift toward treating wine as a product to be engineered, rather than an agricultural expression to be guided.

Chart 2: Physical Processes Source: Understanding Wine Technology by David Bird; Google; and Coppiera

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I’m going to leave you hanging here. For now, think of this as the ingredient list. In the next installment, we’ll talk about what kind of meal it makes and what it says about our industry.