Mega Purple: The Secret Ingredient in Your Vino
If you’re a big wine aficionado, you probably already know about Mega Purple. But when I stumbled upon it over the weekend, I was pretty surprised.
When you read about wine, you hear all kinds of positive things—how beneficial a glass a day can be for your health, how delicious it is, how amazingly intricate the process of making wine is, how natural wine itself is.
It turns out that wine isn’t always 100% natural… or, at least, not in the way many of us would think. In a world full of food additives from everything to growth hormones to preservatives to colors, it’s really not that surprising.
Mega Purple, a food additive made by grapes, is used to add color to many “cheaper” wines, but it has also been known to alter the taste of wine, as well as the texture. It’s used by most wines below $20 in the United States in order to—get this—standardize wine.