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Jean-Hugues Bretin.'s avatar

Thank you, Simon, for this article on QR Code Regulation! We have significantly updated our original article to include the latest information from the Q&A. Indeed, Regulation is complex, subject to interpretations, and circles back to previous definitions. Moreover, laws occur at the country level. And there is no doubt that wine lobbyists will try to make things go their way.

In your article, you mention some facts and data from Raisin that are not 100% accurate, so we'd like to take this opportunity to clarify (note that Raisin has not been interviewed for this article):

* The QR Code Generator is free for Raisin's community, which means that 3,200 winemakers already listed can benefit from our service for free. And since we already have their data, creating a QR Code will take only 5 minutes. You can try it if you want ;-)

* Regarding the "claimed queue," we are currently at 4,206 winemakers to investigate, even "more than 3,000" stated 😊 If not yet listed as Natural on Raisin, winemakers need to contact us, send us their info and wait a maximum of 3 months (please have a little more patience considering the size of our team and the number of requests received)

* The Raisin subscription allows validated winemakers to access extra features, like editing their info, adding their wines, adding photos, and receiving their Raisin Sticker; there is no need to pay to access the QR code generator.

* Our business model is similar to yours: when people support us, we can continue doing what we do.

We conduct thorough analyses so that winemakers can enter our map. All natural winemakers who use our QR Code Generator for free have a little Raisin logo in their QR code, making it even easier for natural wine drinkers to recognize natural wines.

If you need further information, don't hesitate to reach out: we are here to help!


Best Regards,

The Raisin Team.

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David Schildknecht's avatar

Thanks for another highly-informative piece, Simon!

I am convinced that EU-mandated analyses will reveal a great deal more addition of tartaric acid than most consumers would anticipate. In an era when even German Riesling growers are tempted in that direction, one can be sure that the practice is widespread and, as the planet warms, increasingly so. Acidification is, for example, widespread in Burgundy for both reds and whites. I could imagine a clever winegrower arguing that the tartaric addition employed to keep his or her wine’s pH from reaching what he or she perceives as a perilously high level won’t actually show up in the finished wine, as it is often the case when tartaric acid is added to musts that it eventually precipitates out as sodium or potassium bitartrate, whose crystals the winemaker would then filter-out. I’ve tasted German Rieslings whose musts were acidified only to end up with less tartaric acidity in the finished wine than the must had in its natural state.

Apropos Burgundy – now on the subject of chaptalization – I would just like to reiterate a point I made to Simon in our discussion of natural wine’s defining characteristics: To the extent that justly prestigious winegrowers still add sugar to their musts, it is not for the sake of higher alcohol or more body in the finished wine (as might well have been their practice thirty or more years ago in “unripe” vintages) but instead follows a time-honored practice of tiny incremental additions during the course of fermentation as a means of prolonging it.

Little Wine’s platform encourages a winemaker to “tell [his or her] terroir-driven story” and their E-Zine is full of really excellent winemaker profiles written by Little Wine’s three-person staff, two of whom are co-founders of the U.K.’s Austrian-oriented Newcomer Wines. There is thus a lot that would qualify as promotional, and if the EU-e-labels feature of Little Wine’s website is somehow sufficiently walled-off to pass legal scrutiny, then that indicates a favorably lenient interpretation of EU law.

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