What is Mega Purple and why are people mad about it?
If you drink a lot of Californian wine, you’re bound to come across the term “Mega Purple” at some point, usually in reference to syrupy, super-ripe, high-ABV wines with impossibly deep colors. Mega Purple is a wine additive that—like magic—grants a deeper color to a wine lacking in that department.
Worried about finding scary chemicals in your wine? Here are some answers to your questions about grape concentrates like Mega Purple.
How do they get the purple in Mega Purple?
Mega Purple is a grape juice product currently made by fruit processor Vie-Del. It’s manufactured using a grape called Rubired, a variety developed in the ‘50s at U.C. Davis. Rubired is a teinturier: that is, a grape with red flesh rather than the usual colorless stuff, which makes it the perfect grape if the only attribute you care about is color. The process for making Mega Purple is closely guarded, but it’s generally assumed to involve some kind of distillation. Other grape concentrates exist, but Mega Purple is the most popular.
The resulting concoction is a sugary, highly concentrated, deeply-colored grape syrup that gets added to wines, usually before fermentation. For the health worriers among us, remember that Mega Purple is just concentrated grapes, and there’s no reason it should be more harmful to the human body than, y’know, wine.
Who’s using Mega Purple and why?
The who question is a tough one to answer. Dan Berger reports in Wine Vines Analytics that several of the dozen wine producers he interviewed freely admitted to using the additive, though he doesn’t name names. Mega Purple is thought to be commonly used among producers of inexpensive wines, though most are understandably reluctant to mention it. It’s said to be especially popular in Pinot Noir, whose lighter color might be wrongly seen by consumers as a lack of flavor.
Troublingly, Mega Purple is rumored to be used by producers of higher-end Californian wines—again, not to name any names. Mega Purple accusations are usually aimed at wines made in a ripe, rich, jammy style that retail for prices that make serious wine drinkers roll their eyes, even as moneyed suburbanites scoop them up for triple digits. (A Redditor came up with my absolute favorite term for these wines: “boomer cabs.” Boomer winos, please don’t hate me. I’m talking about your asshole brother with the huge lawn, not you.)
The why question is a little easier. Why add Mega Purple to a perfectly good wine? Sadly, wine drinkers in the U.S. tend to see darker, heavier wines as higher in quality. This is especially true of wine drinkers whose sampling of high-end wines has been limited to rich, ripe, deeply colored New World reds rather than—say—more modestly-colored Old World wines. Visual appeal is a powerful marketing tool, and American winemakers undoubtedly feel pressured to come up with a product that meets consumers’ expectations for what wine is “supposed” to look like, even if those expectations are a bit ridiculous.
A lightly colored wine might be intensely flavorful—look at Burgundy and Barolo!—but if buyers aren’t convinced, the wine won’t sell. It’s easy to understand why cash-strapped winemakers might decide that a little Mega Purple won’t make a big difference to a wine’s flavor, and might convince less wine-savvy drinkers to give it a try. This is one of the reasons wine critics credit Mega Purple with promoting a homogenous vision of what quality wine is “supposed” to look like. You might say that Mega Purple is to wine as Photoshop is to Instagram models.
Will I know if my wine contains Mega Purple?
Generally, wine labels in the United States aren’t required to contain an ingredient list or to indicate the presence of most wine additives. (If you want to get technical, only Yellow No. 5, cochineal extract, and carmine are required to be disclosed on wine labels, as well as sulfites if they’re present at 10 or more parts per million.) Because grape concentrates aren’t harmful to human health—and, no, offended taste buds don’t count—regulatory bodies aren’t too concerned about them.
That leaves you with your palate as a guide. In addition to sweetness—the additive clocks in at about 68% sugar—Mega Purple is said to add a jammy overripeness to wine. That said, there are plenty of jammy, overripe, deeply colored wines with no Mega Purple evident. The Mega Purple trend is more of a symptom of these wines than a root cause. If you want to avoid Mega Purple, you may have to get out of your comfort zone.
How can I avoid Mega Purple?
Want an antidote to Mega Purple? Don’t worry about trying to taste the additives in your wine. Your goal isn’t to avoid Mega Purple. Your goal is to buy a delicious wine that showcases the complexity of the grapes used to make it. Your goal is to abandon your sense of what high quality wine “should” taste like and embrace the uniqueness of each grape variety and the climates that ripen these varieties to their full potential, even if they don’t result in full-bodied wines with striking colors. The solution to the Big-Ass Deep Purple Wine trend is to buy wines in more reserved, complex styles from small (or smaller) producers.
If you’re a California fiend on a budget, try wines from cooler places or with lighter, less fruity styles, like Au Bon Climat in Santa Barbara, or Sonoma’s incredible Kunde Winery. Or get your Pinot Noir fix outside California in my home state of Oregon. Earlier this year, at a trade event, I sampled wines by White Walnut Estate’s Chris Mazepink that could stand up to any of Napa’s offerings.
To put it bluntly: you need to start supporting producers who are trying to make wine in a style that embraces the nuances of the grape varieties you choose to drink rather than forcing them into cookie-cutter wines. And slap anyone who tells you that good wines have to look like Twilight Sparkle.
