What's in Your Wine?

On every can of White Claw, America’s best-selling hard seltzer by a wide mar-gin, you’ll see the words “Made Pure.” The company actually trademarked the phrase.

You’ll also see “The Purest Hard Seltzer in the World” and written on the back is something almost no wine label yet has: nutritional and ingredient information. Every can of White Claw stresses that the product contains 100 calories per serving and just 2 grams added sugar. Ingredients include purified carbonated water, alcohol, natural flavors, cane sugar, citric acid, natural fruit juice concentrate and sodium citrate.

A typical glass of red wine has 120 calories and less than 2 grams residual sugar. Ingredients include fermented grapes, sulfites for preservation and possibly tartaric acid or oak tannins. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the label on your bottle.

The wine industry has long resisted nutritional and ingredient labeling, arguing that consumers may be confused over some ingredients and that it’s too difficult to test changing nutritional values from vintage to vintage. Soon though, winemakers may not have a choice—the European Union is considering requiring ingredient labels on all wines sold there. But in the name of transparency, U.S. wineries should embrace broader labels now.

Today’s consumers care deeply about what they eat and drink, and they are used to checking the labels on the products they buy. “We put two things on every label,” says Jones. “We put alcohol and we put sulfites, and they’re both negative. Why don’t we print everything that’s in there and give it a positive spin?”