Ultra-processed wines… and how to avoid them

Seeking reverse gear?

We’ve all seen the headlines blaming health fears and Gen Z sobriety for the fall in global alcohol consumption, not least including wine.

But the reality may be more nuanced. I don’t believe that wine itself is being rejected, but industrial wines.

In this article, I use ‘industrial’ to describe wines that rely heavily on technological and chemical interventions, much like ultra-processed foods.

Some of the high-volume, globally distributed, familiar brands typically found on the lower supermarket shelves have come to define this industrial wine style.

While all wine is, by definition, processed from the moment the grapes begin fermenting, there’s a meaningful distinction between wines shaped by careful, moderate intervention and those engineered for volume, conformity and shelf-life.

I’m firmly of the view that the latter should be clearly distinguished from low-intervention wines (organic, biodynamic, natural, Haute Valeur Environnementale, and so on) and from traditional appellation wines across both the Old and New Worlds.

Based on recent data from the OIV (International Organisation of Vine and Wine), the decline in consumption disproportionately affects industrial wines.

Thirty years ago, when I was editing a wine magazine in Paris, I watched these early ‘gateway’ wines arrive.

Driven by the expansion of North American markets and the rise of New World producers, they were initially welcomed, even in France, as a means of attracting new drinkers.

Today, however, the same types of wine risk turning away new consumers.

If someone’s first encounter with wine is a high-yield, high-alcohol, heavily adjusted style, you could hardly blame them if it were their last.

Might this be determining whether younger drinkers engage with wine long-term?

Global phenomenon

These industrial wines now dominate the global market.

This is easily observable; however, proving it with precision is difficult as the wine trade doesn’t measure what would make it trackable.

There’s no system yet to categorise wine by its degree of processing: only by price (entry-level/premium/fine wine), origin and format (bulk vs bottled).

I would argue that a defined wine category such as ‘ultra-processed’ could be helpful.

It’s a term modelled, in part, on the four-group Nova classification system, developed by a public health unit at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, in which ‘Group 4’ foods are defined by the cumulative use of industrial techniques and inputs to standardise flavour, texture and shelf stability at scale.

The analogy in wine isn’t exact, but it is instructive. We label a bottle as ‘organic’, but not as ‘ultra-processed’.

Certified organic vineyards represent a little above 6% of global plantings, according to OIV’s 2021 The World Organic Vineyard report (across 63 countries, as measured in 2019), placing this category firmly in the minority, while traditional appellation wines make up, at most, a further 20%-25%.

High volume, low price dominance

For a revealing glimpse at the other end, Richard Hemming MW has stated that ‘96% of the wine sold in the UK retails for less than £9 per bottle’ (jancisrobinson.com, March 2018), citing a WSET research paper by Tim Jackson MW (recent comparables are hard to come by, but such price point statistics tend to be fairly static in UK retail, especially in the context of the declining market in general in the period since).

In addition, a 2025 Vinetur report found that eight major wine groups account for 10%-12% of the global market.

E&J Gallo’s high-volume brands alone are estimated to produce around 3% (the Modesto, California-based company does also have premium wines in its portfolio).

There are many more than those eight, not to mention the layer of private-label, bulk and contract-produced wines.

The industry may not measure industrial wine directly, but by any reasonable reading of the data, it dominates the global market, accounting for some 70%-80%.

Health considerations

Can it be said that industrial wines are less healthful? Yes.

Peer-reviewed evidence suggests that some techniques commonly used in winemaking, such as fining, maceration with the skins, chaptalisation and acidification (which can all be termed ‘processing’) have been shown to alter mineral and micronutrient content, in some cases ‘significantly’ (source: Shimizu et al, 2020, ‘Variation in the mineral composition of wine produced using different winemaking techniques’).

And a 2025 report by Pesticide Action Network Europe (PAN) found widespread contamination of European wines with trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), a toxic ‘forever chemical’ byproduct of PFAS pesticides.

The report notes that mass-produced wines are often loaded with up to eight different synthetic pesticide residues.

As wine production becomes more industrial, there is a greater reliance on vineyard chemicals – including pesticides and other treatments (to control mildew and vine diseases, for example), which can leave residues – and cellar additives, including colour adjustment, flavour modification, stabilisation, added sugars and higher sulphur-dioxide levels.

Dr Laura Catena (pictured, above) is a Harvard- and Stanford-trained biologist and physician, the managing director of Argentina’s Bodega Catena Zapata and founder of the Catena Institute of Wine.

She notes that large-scale production makes it difficult to tailor the inputs that contribute to a wine’s composition and health profile.

So, if more intervention introduces more inputs, the inverse also holds: wines made with fewer inputs will tend to offer a cleaner, more considered choice.

This isn’t medical advice, but it is an evidence-informed perspective drawn from decades in wine alongside contemporary research.

Pros and cons

Is the global decline in wine sales a marker of healthier living?

Today, daily contradictions assail us. Wine is praised for its potential benefits one moment and condemned the next.

Having scoured dozens of studies, I can say the common denominator is that most ignore context, from the French Paradox theory that suggests certain populations in France have historically exhibited low rates of heart disease despite their regular consumption of wine and cheese, to the world’s seven so-called Blue Zones – regions of apparent exceptional human longevity, where wine is consumed in moderation.

There is criticism of Blue Zones research that has centred largely on the reliability of age records and demographic data, rather than on the lifestyle patterns themselves.

This distinction is important: while the numbers may be debated, the observed behaviours such as diet, social connection and daily activity all continue to shape discussions around longevity.

Most of the literature focuses on ethanol as the sole driver of risk.

Yes, alcohol carries risk. Wine quality and context don’t erase this, but I firmly contend that they mitigate it.

Wine quality shapes how people drink; it contextualises it. And, as 16th-century physician, alchemist and theologian Paracelsus notably observed (originally in Latin), ‘the dose makes the poison’.

Catena concurs: ‘As a physician, I do believe that wine in moderation can be part of a healthy diet and lifestyle, as demonstrated by hundreds of studies showing that people who drink wine in moderation have lower mortality and fewer heart attacks, and those who follow a Mediterranean diet, which often includes light-to-moderate wine, have lower rates of heart disease and cancer.

Generation Z and a return to intentional drinking?

The relationship that Generation Z (generally seen as those born 1997-2012) has with wine is complex, shaped by social habits, economics and evolving tastes and health concerns.

Industry analysis from IWSR shows that they favour wines ‘aligned with values such as sustainability and authenticity’.

Though the traditional wine terminology and packaging formats often feel outdated to them, moderation trends are also evident.

I have a front-row seat to this shift.

My surfing, weight-training Gen Z sons spend their holidays taking cooking classes with girlfriends in Greece or attending wine tastings on Lake Garda.

I’m not sure they would have survived my gloriously wine-soaked, debauched youth in 1980s Paris.

Still, is it his generation’s more mindful, lifestyle-influenced drinking choices that are to blame for waning global wine sales? Or is it the much-changed wines?

So how did we get here?

Since Roman vintners burned sulphur candles in their barrels and amphorae to keep them sanitised, wine has never been untouched by human hands; it has always existed in a subtle partnership between nature and human intervention.

But the French wine of the early 1800s was a different animal compared to what it is today.

Before phylloxera (the vine root louse that arose in the late 19th century) and pre-chemical, there was no glyphosate – that was invented as a weedkiller in 1970 by Monsanto.

Chaptalisation (the addition of sugar to increase potential alcohol), other additives and sulphur were known and used, but not heavily.

But then we hit the phylloxera era, with its initial peak in the 1860s-1880s – European vineyards were devastated.

As recovery from the crisis began, choices made during replanting using the new, resistant American rootstocks led to high yields, as industrial-scale irrigation and fertiliser use produced vast quantities of cheap wine.

By the early 1900s, the wine industry was in a similar position to what it is today.

How did it respond? With irrigation bans and the introduction of appellation laws, which started in France with laws such as the 1905 regulations on fraud, falsification and geographical origin, and the subsequent 1919 extension bringing additional protections for producers within a given appellation.

The real explosion in chemical inputs occurred after World War II, when agriculture and food production became industrialised through the dismantling by the Allied powers of the vast German chemical conglomerate IG Farben.

This post-war expansion of industrial agricultural inputs fed directly into the wider mid-20th century transformation known as the Green Revolution, which, from the 1940s through the 1970s, combined high-yield crop varieties, synthetic fertilisers, chemical pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation to dramatically increase global food production.

Wine didn’t escape this – these events pushed it into the centre of an incoming imperfect storm and into a new alchemy.

'Parkerisation'

The rapid expansion of supermarket empires, from the 1930s in the US and 1950s in the UK, demanded vintage reliability, consistent flavour profiles, huge volumes and low price points.

The traditional wines from picturesque villages with their mosaics of small plots and local generational knowledge didn’t fit this new landscape.

This new demand favoured New World producers, which weren’t subject to the same wine-production rules and limitations, and in this environment, technology took hold, allowing producers to ‘engineer’ consistent flavour profiles, even from lower-quality grapes.

Irrigation allowed the expansion of vineyards into marginal areas (such as California’s Central Valley) by unlocking deserts and plains, coaxing vines to yield far more fruit than the old dry-farmed hillsides ever could.

Meanwhile, the ‘Parkerisation effect’ arrived.

Wine critics such as Robert M Parker Jr (most prominent in the late 1980s-2000s) elevated lush, fruit-forward, heavily oaked, high-alcohol, ripe Napa Valley styles.

We also saw the large corporations consolidate control and begin to market wine like any other fast-moving consumer product, offering the same taste year after year.

Consistency and consolidation have reshaped the industry into what it is today.

In contrast, the smaller, terroir-driven wines have continued to be marginalised by the convenient and stereotypical narrative that they are unaffordable, unapproachable or complicated.

Connecting the dots: reclaiming wine and wellness

The proliferation of industrial wines and their dependence on irrigation, the declining consumption of the mass-market sector, and Gen Z turning away from wine – these are all part of the same conversation.

Wines that once enticed new consumers with cheap abundance are now driving them away. Wine was never meant to be a generic beverage – its value has always come from ‘place’.

Wine has morphed from a locally produced agricultural product to a mass-consumer product.

This has contributed to the weakening of its cultural meaning and, as in many other sectors, has instigated a reaction against industrialisation.

The historical arc I’ve presented here matters because the pivot being made by the Gen Z demographic toward moderation, sustainability and authenticity raises a profound question: was the mid-20th-century industrial phase a necessary, perhaps inevitable, but temporary deviation in wine’s history?

Are market forces now encouraging a return to lower-input, place-driven practices? Wouldn’t it be nice if this new generation inadvertently brought us full circle? I love this line of thought.

With all the bad news in the wine world at the moment, perhaps we’re creating a happy ending.

Wine, like food, has been swept up in the tide of industrialisation, where tradition is overshadowed by scale and cost, and distanced from its rituals, its terroir and its role in human wellbeing.

Wines made with regard for nature, not against it, will always have a place at my table.

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