Berger: What’s in your ‘wine vinegar’

When you buy a bottle of wine vinegar in a supermarket, do you know what’s in it?

This question has plagued me, off and on, for 20 years. Every time I try to investigate it, I get nowhere. More about this stone-walling later.

My first assumption was that anything called “wine vinegar” started out life as wine, then was converted into an acetic acid solution to do the work that few other liquids can. The many uses of vinegar are widely known.

Vinegar can be made easily using just water and yeast; other products have been used in its manufacture, such as apple cider. Traditional wine vinegar starts with wine, white or red.

As the base for salad dressings and many other foods, it is a staple.

In the early 1990s I began investigating what was in vinegar. I did not look at the long-aged balsamic vinegars of Modena, Italy, a whole different sort of vinegar.

I started by seeking the federal definition of wine vinegar. Two months ago, decades after my casual quest, I was chatting with retired winemaker Brad Alderson and I asked him if he knew the federal definition of wine vinegar.

“There is none,” said Alderson.

That answered part of the riddle. About 15 years ago, a chemist friend told me that a lot of the “wine vinegar” sold on store shelves from large companies, with recognizable names, never started life as wine. It was called “wine vinegar,” but the “wine” came from material other than grapes.

Indeed, he said, the “wine vinegar” we see on store shelves may well be made from “citrus wine” using citrus peels’ volatile oils.

One of the largest companies in the world that makes vinegars and many other citrus products, along with Cruzan Rum, is Todhunter International of Florida. (Florida? Citrus?) I began calling the company; 15 years later, after several calls to find out if the company makes citrus wine vinegar, I have never gotten a return call.

“There is a wall of silence in the vinegar business,” said Alderson, former general manager at Robert Mondavi Winery. He said giant companies don’t want anyone to learn how bland and uninteresting their vinegars are - or what they are made from. So they clam up.

Alderson long has been fascinated by the fact that most “wine vinegars” have no character, except vinegar-iness. And he doesn’t buy the old line that says vinegar is just spoiled wine, thus implying that vinegar is a salvage product. He said the better the wine used to make a vinegar, the better the flavor of the vinegar.

To prove the point, more than a decade ago he began to make small batches of high-quality wine vinegar, barrel-aged them and gave bottles to friends. Recently, he began selling small amounts.

The product quality is phenomenal. It has real red wine character (the base wines were excellent), and even has a few percentage points of alcohol for wine flavor.

Most supermarket vinegars are 5%-6% acetic acid. Alderson’s is 7.5% to 8% acetic, isn’t sterile filtered, and gives foods an extra kick, mainly from the red wine flavor it imparts. His salad dressing is simple and superb.

He admits that his little venture (the product is called simply Traditional Method Vinegar) isn’t as commercial as it could be, but he wants to remain small. (The website is http://www.traditionalmethod.com/)

What drives him to keep making this product is what he calls the utterly mundane quality of supermarket red wine vinegars.

“When you taste real cheese for the first time, suddenly Velveeta doesn’t taste so good anymore,” he said by way of comparison.

Brad makes some 200 cases of vinegar a year (four barrels), and calls it “a decent business - it pays for my wine bill.”

Dan Berger lives in Sonoma County, where he publishes “Vintage Experiences,” a weekly wine newsletter. Write to him at winenut@gmail.com.