BudgetBacchus

Have you ever wondered about the wine labels on the bottles of wine you drink?  Ok, me neither, unless they’re particularly outrageous, clever, or unusual.

Well, it turns out that labels on wine whose alcohol content exceeds 7% are regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Trade Tax Bureau, a part of the U.S. Dept of the Treasury.  There is a whole list of information that must be included on the label, and even the decorative design of the label has to pass some kind of approval process.  Labels are rejected for any number of arbitrary reasons.

Some of the information that must be included on a label is: Vintage Date, Alcohol Content, Declaration of Sulfites (sulfites occur naturally in grapes and the winemaking process, but are also used for preservation and sterilization purposes— bottles will say they contain sulfites if the concentration is greater than 10 parts per million), Net Contents, Country of Origin, and the Name/Address of the Bottler or Importer.

The more interesting information that might be on the label are other designations that will tell you a bit more about the grapes used in the vintage.  “Estate Bottled” indicates that all of the wine was made from grapes grown on land owned by the winery.  The label can’t list a viticultural area unless 85% or more of the grapes came from that area.  So for those of you who read my Trader Joes Merlot post awhile back, since the Trader Joes wine doesn’t say “Paso Robles” anywhere on the label you would know that even though the Paso Robles Winery, Castoro, made the wine, the grapes themselves may have come from any number of sources. 

Wines are not required to list the varietal, but if they do, it guarantees the pedigree of the grapes.  You often see more generic designations, such as “Red Wine”, or “Table Wine”.

And as for the restrictions on the decorative content of the label, the Trade Tax Bureau doesn’t list any specific constraints.  But the label I pasted above somehow made it through!