DNA and consumer confidence

In the 1970s, the once‐famous Italian redwine Chianti acquired a bad reputation for being cheap and often of low quality. Many wine makers had concentrated on quantity rather than quality and frequently mixed their must, the starting extract from grapes, with that of cheaper grapes from other regions of Italy. To regain the former standing of Chianti wines, in 1984 the Italian government issued the DOCG (Vino di origine controllata e garantita—Wines of controlled and guaranteed origin) label, which puts strict requirements on wine producers as to which grapes they are allowed to use for each quality of wine. The Chianti wine makers complied and, today, the reputation of the wine is restored. The policy also paid dividends as prices increased with quality—a premium Chianti Riserva from the Gallo Nero region between Florence and Siena now easily fetches € 40 or more.![][1] But the higher price of Chianti created a new problem: as prices rose, so did the temptation for unscrupulous fraudsters to use cheaper grapes and sell their wine under the Chianti label—a practice that wine producers everywhere face, be it in Italy, France or California. This does not necessarily pose a challenge for the expert, who can tell if a Spanish Rioja is made from the right grapes, said Javier Ibanez from the Instituto Madrileno de Investigacion Agraria e Alimentaria in Madrid, Spain. But it is more of a problem for the consumers and wine sellers who put their trust in what is stated on the bottle. Ibanez's group is thus developing DNA fingerprinting as a means to identify grape varieties in must and bottled wines that would allow laboratories to verify a wine's content. Although this is not a problem at the moment for Spanish wines, he thinks that it is a worthwhile tool to have to … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif