RESEARCH: TESTS CAN’T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN WOOD CHIPS AND BARRELS. CONSUMER’S ONLY GUARANTEE IS TRANSPARENT LABELING

As things currently stand, it is impossible to distinguish with laboratory tests whether wood chips or oak barrels were used during the winemaking process. This was recently revealed in Rome at an informal meeting of the Agricultural Commission of the Senate, during which the director of the Experimental Institute for Enology in Asti, Mario Ubigli, emphasized that “there is no possibility of analytical controls” to determine eventual commerce fraud.
The EU’s go ahead for the use of wood chips as an alternative method for giving wine a wood flavor is “the fruit of a long experimental path by the Oiv, that has been able to verify the efficacy of the solution - wood chips used to give wood odor to table wines, both for technical and economic reasons. Ageing through the use of wood chips remains inapplicable for products that a consumer would expect to have a distinct taste, like that of a certain varietal wine, and for wines with the controlled origin of denomination certification.
The vineyards of the Piedmont region, for example, are all DOC and therefore cannot use wood chips and must maintain efforts of safeguarding quality that have continued for 10 years in this territory. We repeat our no to wood chips for DOC wines, while their use for table wines can be considered, without, however, erroneously inducing the consumer, who must be informed about buying choices and guaranteed against possible fraud in commerce”.