Modern science making wines less typical ??

Although many people in the wine trade are doing their best to make clean and natural wines it is sometimes good that science comes to the rescue and gives winemakers the tools to do what they want to do: make wines that are fun to drink.

It was Wim Van Leuven (La Buena Vida) who mentioned, in a masterclass on Spanish wines in the wine course I am doing this year, that not everything is as natural as it seems though. In quite some cases there are quite some manipulations done by the winemaker in order to make wines that can please people.

Searching for "Produits Oenologique" in Google brings up a whole slew of products that can help in turning basically any grapejuice into a more or less decent wine, and in the process of doing so it is very well possible to give certain characteristics to this wine for which a winemaker that does not use these kind of tools may need to go through a lot of trouble.

What to think of products that promote themselves with sentences like "Yeast for fresh white wines, showing complexity and elegance with strong revelation of citrus notes like grapefruit. Produces wines of an intense freshness and great aromatic sharpness" or "Instantaneously dissolving (IDP) ellagic and proanthocyanidic tannin preparation based on grape tanins.
> To refresh white and rosé wine (against oxydation, atypical aging, light reduction).
> To bring volume and length.
> To help eliminate reductive odours." ?

Seemingly the grape quality/variety is not that important anymore if products like the above exist to make any grape smell like grapefruit and other products reduce the typical reductive odours that are so typical of certain wines (Syrah from the the northern Rhone comes to mind).

Having said all of the above it is of course clear that I also like my wines fresh and juicy and full-bodied and in most cases I may not even want to know how this result was obtained ...