To our wonderful email mailing list.

The last section of this email speaks of product differentiation in the marketplace and the problems associated with added sugar in beverages, including wine. It is groundbreaking research and very long, but it cuts to the core as to the value add and thoroughness we go to in making all of our wines: dry, sweet, red and white.

Typing this while enjoying a glass of our 2011 Traminette, recently named to an end of year top 10 wine list! The list, put out by wine writer Howard Hewitt, is a list of wines available in the Indiana market which provide a great bang for the buck. The list is a great who’s who of wines across the world, including Concannon and Bonterra from California, Alain Juame & Fils Domaine and La Vieille from France. Our Traminette came in at number 5 on the list! So exciting, yet humbling. It really speaks volume for all of the hard work and dedication to exceptional wine quality the staff, Laura and I commit ourselves to daily. If you would like to see Howard Hewitt’s “Grape Sense”, please go to http://www.tribtown.com/entertainment/-34164--.html.

What I like about the traminette is the dry, crisp citrus and lychee notes. It’s both soft and clean on the palate, which makes it enjoyable both as an aperitif, especially when writing emails, and with lighter fared foods, such tilapia. The alcohol is purposefully lower which allows the acids to fully express themselves and, as a bonus, allows me to enjoy a little extra. Tonight, I should be able to enjoy perhaps two glasses without my typing turning a bit “valley girl” strange, like the November newsletter drifted towards it’s conclusion. From a funny note, I never send the emails right after I finish them, as I very much prefer to proof them with tea in the morning. I just had to laugh at the November diatribe which disguised itself as an official email that morning. However, getting a nice chuckle, I felt compelled to send it as it was written with minimal edits. Exactly where did “diatribe,” “chuckle,” “disguised itself,” and “compelled” come out of my brain? What’s in this traminette? What happens if you mix traminette and chambourcin? Perhaps we’ll delve into a vocabulary conundrum later. “Conundrum”, there we go again.

Upcoming Events:

February 3^rd: The Wine Cellar in Vevay, Indiana at 6:00. Stop by as Jim will be pouring and discussing some great Turtle Run Winery wines! If you are on this list and own a store and would like me to pour wines, please let me know and we’ll try to make a date.

February 11&12 and 18&19: Chocolate Lovers Weekend and a Blast from the Past: Hop on the Indiana Uplands Wine Trail and enjoy chocolate and wines paired together. At Turtle Run, we will additionally serve Laura’s Raspberry Wine Cake and I will provide a little Blast from the Past as we’ll pop the corks on some older vintages as well. This is a free event.

Wine Appreciation Classes are now full for 11^th and 18^th. Due to the waiting list, I have decided to offer another class on April 21^st from 6:30 to 9:30. We’ll take a deep dive into all things wine, dinner included. People seem to really like the $35 per person price, so we’ll keep it the same. For the February classes, I am looking at quite a few wonderful French bottles of wine, including one from Gevry-Chambertin! The April class will also have us set sail as we’ll familiarize you with hard to understand labels. Destination unknown, but suggestions are very much welcomed!

March Gladness: A food and wine experience presented by the Indiana Uplands Wine Trail. March 10&11 and 17&18. This is a ticketed event. This year’s event has an international theme to it and at Le Vin de Turtle, you’ll be enjoying de pan du Francais! Along with French bread, we’ll have other savory French items as well.

New Wines! The staff and I have been taking advantage of the weather and have gotten way ahead in our pruning efforts, however before the 11^th, expect Max’s Small Batch Red #33 to be bottled. Expect it to be over the top massive, but in limited quantity. Speaking of Max, I tip my hat to everyone out there who has coached their son’s or daughter’s teams! Lot’s of time committed, and mostly very enjoyable. But to all the coaches out there, you know why I am saying, “I tip my hat to you!!!” Thank you for your service to our youth.

Upcoming concerts! Our summer series concerts will start on May 20^th this year and could go through the 15^th of July. They will start back up Labor Day weekend, and will continue into the first weekend in November. So far, we have The Vinyl Kings, The Monarchs, Nervous Melvin and the Mistakes and Circus lined up for several dates. Ron Jones and his Jazz Quartet are playing phone tag with me, and I have some inbound and outbound emails with other bands. I’ve heard we should schedule the Rigsby’s and certainly get back a few others like the Lick Creek Band and Bomar and Ritter among others. As soon as we have it finalized, we’ll let you know.

Sugar Anyone?

Value Proposition to the wine consumer: Turtle Run Winery does not add sugar or any sort of sugar substitute to make sweeter wine. We rely solely on the natural sweetness of the fruit, grapes for grapes, raspberry for raspberry, and blackberry for blackberry.  We may not have the sweetest wines, but side by side, if our wines taste as sweet as another, perhaps ours has just a few less calories. Here is why:
What you are about to read has been discussed with physicians, nutritionists, nurses and others in health care and health related fields. What I am writing is not conclusive, but it is well thought out and well researched, and to my knowledge I am the only one who is targeting a very specific molecule which we consume far too much on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. I do not have a degree in medicine, or in a health related field, but natural sciences come extremely easy for me to understand. I took physics to boost in my GPA in college, for instance.

In 2006, I had a series of diabetic customers tell me that they could drink our sweeter wines and it didn’t affect their sugar levels.  Because I was too busy in “Corporate America” I did not have a chance to explore why.  As someone who has exercised very regularly all of my life, I was surprised in 2008, during a physical, that my blood work wasn’t so great.  On the verge of high blood pressure?  That can’t be me.  However, in the spring of 2011, my term life insurance expired as I moved into a new age class.  Due top the changes I implemented in what I consume, I got the lowest rate available from New York Life, as my blood work turned in perfect numbers.  Blood pressure this time?  120 over 80.  Tested again, it was 116 over 80.  Perfect.  In the meantime, I discovered and uncovered many amazing thoughts about many of today’s diseases that cripple the US healthcare and I discovered why my sweeter wines do not cause diabetics problems.

I am on a crusade against our modern diet, and modern winemaking which are both loaded with simple glucose based products that are causing extreme health issues. This newsletter may be the very first that targets the key problem – the sugar molecule that keeps our brain going, glucose. If there is nothing else you click on today, please click this link, http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/slides/long_term_trends.pdf and you will see a very noted increase in the percent of Americans that have diabetes. This is unfortunate, and the lack of knowledge in our society is extremely apparent. The simple truth is we are not eating enough natural fruits, vegetables and grains. We are not eating nearly enough complex carbohydrates and fibers. We are consuming too many highly processed, easily absorbed foods and drinks which are bodies are hard wired to enjoy, but are not best to keep our engines running smoothly.
I am going to very exactly explain the problem with our diets, the relationship and history of sugar in the wine industry, and what you can do about it, including how you can tell if a beverage has a high concentration of glucose. I’ll also explain why I call “High Fructose Corn Syrup” “High Glucose Corn Syrup.”
Glucose problem: Ever travel through the countryside and wonder what happens to all of that corn that you see growing everywhere? Only 1% of it is consumed as corn as it is in our diets. The rest is processed into our food system, and used for making all sorts of other non-food items, including water bottles. How did it get this way? Very simple. One of the concerns world governments had at the turn of the 1800 to the 1900’s was the growing population and the ability for the food supply to keep up. The problem was we were maxing out what our soils could provide us. We had to find a way to reduce leaving fields fallow and find a way to re-energize them on an annual basis. Germany, in their quest for making bombs, figured out how to “fix” nitrogen from the air. By figuring that out, scientists realized that fixed nitrogen could be readily added to soil, thereby reducing how often a field would need to lay fallow. Commercial fertilizers were born. As population continued to increase, science looked to separate the crops that could provide a lot of calories per acre, from the ones that were not as efficient. Today, you see the result of the monoculture in the plants we consume in the corn, soybeans and wheat hybrids and species.  Not only are we basing so much of our carbohydrate intake on such a few number of species, but such a few amount of varieties hurt the complexity in our diets and leave us at an extreme risk for pathogens to put a serious crisis on our food supply.  To put it simply, our diets have been dumbed down, and the single biggest problem with monoculture farming is the potential for plant diseases to mutate and wipe out our vast supply of food. However, on the flipside, without the advances in fertilizers and monoculture, increasing the bounty off our lands, it’s very easy to reach the conclusion that our population growth allowed yours and my parents to be born and thus for you and me to be able to exist today.  Our parents and grandparents didn’t starve to death and we’re living proof of that.
In the 1980’s we saw a transformation from sugar to “high fructose corn syrup” in our foods. It was cheaper, mainly due to a government support program, and it allowed farmland in the US to stay active and compete against South American sugar. Please keep in mind that the US’s number one “weapon”, so to speak, is the food supply. A government with starving people will soon not be a government at all. We export a lot of food to ensure we have allies across the globe.  Additionally, in the 1980’s, the number 1 supplier of sugar in the world, Brazil, had political upheaval.  Though I didn’t find any specific paper citing birth of high fructose corn syrup and our subsequent decrease in imports of sugar from Brazil as a US government strategy, it seems to me that this corollary has to be there.  US farms were hurting and Brazil was considerably unstable.  Inflation was rampant.  Sort of like the argument that if the US tapped more of our own oil supplies, we could change the OPEC game, if we could substitute sugar with corn, we could become “sugar independent” and our farm employment could be stabilized.  Call it a “win-win”

So what is sugar, fructose, glucose and High Fructose Corn Syrup? Sugar is C12H24O12, for you chemistry folks, which is molecularly bound glucose and fructose. When sugar is consumed, our body knows to secrete an enzyme to split apart glucose and fructose so those sugars can be used as energy. Straight sugar has no effective use for us unless it can be split apart. Both glucose and fructose are chemically very similar in that their molecule arrangement is C6H12O6, so when the sugar molecule is broken apart, you are left with 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Simple enough.
High Fructose Corn Syrup is simply a blend of glucose and fructose, anywhere from 45% glucose to fructose to 55% glucose to fructose.
Glucose is our brain sugar, and we must have glucose on a daily basis to function. However, have you ever heard the saying, too much of a good thing is bad for you? Much like we must consume salt, it is recommended that we limit our salt intake to reduce high blood pressure among other health issues.
Please go back to that CDC chart and think closely, what foods did you eat in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s compared to what you consume today? Glucose exists very naturally in most fruits, grains and vegetables, but at limited quantities, quantities our bodies have been used to consuming and processing for thousands of years. Our bodies are designed to function best off of the natural foods in comparison to the many processed foods and drinks that we consume today.
Glucose is directly transferred into the blood system through the small intestine. Think about that. It flows directly from the small intestine to our blood system. Compare a nice field with a stream running through it to a parking lot with a drainage ditch running through it. Which is going to flood first when it rains hard? The ditch, of course! Asphalt cannot absorb water, but a field can. The field equates to fruit, vegetables and grains. When it rains, the field slowly releases the water into the stream, much like natural foods through digestion slowly release glucose into your blood. By comparison, the parking lot is like many of today’s drinks. A quick runoff into the ditch becomes a flood, so when you consume a drink or a food that quickly breaks down when consumed, your blood is flooded with glucose. Our pancreas secretes insulin to remove glucose from your blood in order for your body’s cells to use glucose for energy. Herein lies the problem. To use another analogy, our pancreas was never designed to go zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds, which is what we are asking it to do when we consume heavily laden glucose products, such as many of the drinks, crackers, chips, cookies, and other snacks we consume have. The blood chemistry gets out of whack, as our subconscious tries to figure out how to regulate the flood of glucose into our bodies. I strongly hypothesize that High Fructose Corn Syrup, additionally increases the confusion as our bodies try to figure out exactly how much glucose and fructose was just ingested, simply because that blend is not found in a natural state, per se. Additionally though, part of the problem with high fructose corn syrup is that it is delivered to us in products that readily allow it to flow into your blood system. For instance, all nutritionists will say it’s better to eat an orange than to drink orange juice because the pulp in the orange slows down the digestive process.
Fructose, by contrast, is the main fruit sugar, the main sugar in grapes, the main sugar in our sweeter wines, and the primary sugar in honey. It is digested through the liver to supply energy to the body and is not directly absorbed into the blood system through the small intestine. In simple language, it just doesn’t move through the body like glucose does. Too much fructose, however, is not necessarily a good thing either as it can lead to an increase in triglycerides which can lead to weight gain. Too much glucose leads to stored energy as fat as well. However, for the diabetic, fructose has no effect on insulin production. And today, from all of the research I have poured over and over, if I want a sweeter beverage, I’ll enjoy a beverage with fructose over glucose every time, or fructose with a little glucose every time. However, like fruit juices, wine, etc, I will always consume in moderation.
Additionally, here are some other points I’d like to make:

Fructose is 1.72 times sweeter by taste than sucrose and 2.33 times sweeter than glucose by taste. As winemakers and other beverage producers, we can reduce our residual sugar and caloric content and generate a sweet enough taste. More on this in a bit.

The primary sugar of ripe grapes is fructose.  In a mixture of glucose and fructose, yeast will consume at an 80% to 20% clip, glucose over fructose.
The state of California does not allow the addition of sugar in winemaking. The country of Australia does not allow the addition of sugar in winemaking.  Nearly all of the higher quality wines coming out of Europe have no sugar added.  From Wikipedia, “Chaptalization, is the process of adding sugar to unfermented grape juice in order to increase the alcohol content after fermentation. The technique is named after its developer, the French chemist Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal.[1] This process is not intended to make the wine sweeter, but rather to provide more sugar for the yeast to ferment into alcohol.[1]
Chaptalization has generated controversy and discontent in the French wine industry due to advantages that the process is perceived to give producers in poor climate areas. In response to violent demonstrations by protesters in 1907, the French government began regulating the amount of sugar that can be added to wine.

Chaptalization is sometimes referred to as enrichment, for example in the European Union wine regulations specify the legality of the practice within EU.[2]”
The legality of chaptalization varies by country, region, and even wine type. In general, it is legal in regions that produce grapes with low sugar content. Chaptalization is prohibited in Australia, Austria, California, Italy, and South Africa. Germany prohibits the practice for making Prädikatswein or its top quality wines. It is generally permitted in regions where grapes tend to have low sugar content, including regions in France, Germany, and the United States.” Additionally though, because I understand the wine laws very well, I simply cannot think of a European wine available in a store in the US that would have added sugar.
Please note that the addition of sugar is supposed to occur at the beginning of fermentation, not at the time of bottling. In a recent discussion this fall with a very prestigious university, I was informed that sugar breaks down into a glucose / fructose blend in a bottle of wine, if sugar was added to the wine prior to bottling. They are now researching how long it takes for this breakdown to occur, and if it occurs in just wine or if the same occurrence happens with all acidic beverages in which sugar has been added. I also found this information in one of my text books written way back in the last century.  I will cite that book when I get home
Please keep in mind again that yeasts prefer to ferment glucose to fructose, so Chaptalization, the addition of sugar at the beginning of fermentation will naturally leave behind fructose as the residual sugar, just as if the natural sugars were high enough at harvest. So a winery could chaptalize and gain fructose at the end.

When I look at High Fructose Corn Syrup, I come up with several reasons as to why it is what it is. First, from good intentions it closely resembles the percentages of glucose and fructose that exist in a sugar molecule. However, looking at the perceived sweetness relationship between fructose, sucrose, and glucose, I think if the blend was higher in fructose, and had the same perceived sweetness, the consumer, by default, would consume less calories. However, because glucose is directly absorbed into the blood system, unlike fructose, which is broken down by the liver, I believe that glucose is used because it provides the “sugar buzz” which cannot be provided by fructose. Think about that. Would sodas be as popular as they are without the sugar buzz? And since fructose cannot be directly absorbed into the blood system, would the value-add of a sugar buzz be eliminated if the sweetener was more fructose based? That’s why I call it, “high glucose corn syrup.” Glucose for the buzz, fructose for the sweetness. Now you can see why I want High Fructose Corn Syrup renamed “High Glucose Corn Syrup”. Fructose is being blamed as the culprit for causing diabetes when it cannot affect a diabetic. It is the association of fructose to a sweetener with its name that is causing it to be associated incorrectly.

As a winemaker, yes, I have made a few wines over the years with the addition of sugar at the time of bottling, but it’s been a long time.  Additionally, we have never made anything that would even be considered a sweet wine with that process. I think the most amount of residual sugar we have attained over the years by adding sugar is 1-1/2%, which simply provided a “took off the edge” treatment in the taste of the wine. Having studied winemaking in college, I was never comfortable with the process of adding sugar, because as a professional, I preferred doing things in a more technical way, by arresting fermentation, such as cooling and filtering wines with residual sugar in them, or back adding juice. Before researching this, I thought “sugar was sugar”.  Along with making wine in a more technical way, I simply preferred the taste of sweeter wines made by leaving residual sugar behind in fermentation.  To me, they tasted cleaner and more refreshing.  I didn’t know why, but as a winemaker wanting to make the best wines possible, I embraced this process.  In 2009, I “pooched” a wine as the fermentation escaped my control and the wine finished dry.  I simply waited until the 2010 harvest to sweeten it with freshly picked grape juice. 
In 2006, I had a series of diabetic customers say that they could drink our sweeter wines without any issues to their blood sugar levels. I knew I was onto something, but I didn’t know what. I just knew that wines like Joe’s Jammin Red and Sweet Tortuga have never had sugar added to them. Today, we have no wines on our list with the addition of sugar at bottling. We have not added sugar to any grape based wines at the time of bottling since 2007. We cracked the code on blackberry wine two years ago, and this past December, we finally broke through on raspberry wine. For our last summer bottling of raspberry, we got down to an extremely low 15 grams per bottle of added sugar. We do have a few chaptalized wines on our list, and, just like Wikipedia outlined it, all of those wines had the sugar converted to alcohol, with no residual sugar remaining. We will continue to chaptalize as we see fit. Chambourcin comes to mind as the grape that requires chaptalization for most years.

Last year, I discovered the causation of that “cleaner finish” in our sweet wines.  The analysis done for this discovery process not only included testing wines, but juices, fruits and other beverages available in the grocery stores.  How can you tell if a beverage is fructose based versus glucose based? It’s the taste, or specifically where and how you taste it! Fructose’s sweetness occurs on the center of the tongue and moves forward to the front as you finish a beverage. It leaves a really a clean and refreshing taste. Glucose, on the other hand, is tasted at the center of the tongue and moves back. So if you have ever had a beverage in which the sweetness cloys at the back of the roof of the mouth and back of the tongue, you know it contained a significant amount of glucose.  To me, glucose causes a cloying sensation that fructose does not.

With fructose being so much sweeter by taste than glucose, we purposefully drive our residual sugars in our sweeter wines lower. Again, there are some inherent dangers with the over consumption of fructose, but those are far outweighed, to me, by the over consumption of glucose and its direct link to diabetes. Our goals for sweet wines are to simply have enough residual sugar (fructose primarily) to a point in which the wines taste good and are sweet enough, but there isn’t enough residual sugar to cause issues. A year ago, I took most of the available fruits in the grocery store and broke down their percent of residual sugar. To my astonishment, most were between 5% and 10%, with a few reaching up to 15%. Bananas, when green to yellow are in this range, but as they approach brown, their sugar levels skyrocket to the 20% range.  The sweetest wine on our list contains 6% residual sugar, with all of the sweetness derived directly from the grapes (just emphasizing).
From the above information, three parts of it are being read first, to my knowledge, by you. First, I am directly pinpointing glucose, and not blaming the larger molecule, “sugar”, for the problem with diabetes. It is the over consumption of glucose that is at the heart of the diabetic problem. Second, I am suggesting that the bodies have not evolved to process the foods we are consuming today. If I am correct that glucose and fructose are sensed at different areas of the tongue, then it is safe to assume other flavors and sources of calories and vitamins and minerals are sensed by the tongue and this sensory analysis aids our subconscious in figuring out how to digest, process and use what we are consuming.  Can our bodies really cope with quick consumption of high energy sources without fiber?  From a diabetic standpoint, we know that a certain segment of diabetics have pancreas’ that aren’t functioning properly.  Is this caused by forcing our pancreas to work overtime with quick consumption of simple glucose?  Probably, but I cannot find any research supporting this thought.  But I have found no research counteracting this thought as well.  Also, could our subconscious become confused as to how much insulin to produce as this quick ingestion of glucose has arrived for the first time in our evolutionary history?  Basically, is the subconscious becoming confused over time as to how much insulin to produce as we continually abuse our bodies with the consumption of simple carbohydrates?  Could diabetes be attributed to the subconscious simply “giving up” or getting “totally confused?”  I posed this thought to many nurses and doctors over the past year and they are amazed at this thought and think it has merit.  I also found in my studies that the consumption of aspartame caused hunger pains, especially taken after at least two hours of not eating food.  I could not replicate this hunger pain with tea or coffee.  Aspartame’s sweetness, I found, mimicked that of glucose.  Could the subconscious “think” glucose was being consumed and had the pancreas secrete insulin into the blood system?  If so, wouldn’t that cause a blood sugar decrease which would lead to hunger pains?  Those in the science of nutrition and medicine were extremely intrigued by this thought.

Again, the cost of healthcare is skyrocketing. I heard on the radio last week that 34% of Americans are obese, and another 30% are overweight. Simply put, with diabetes, one has to inject oneself with insulin or receive insulin in some other manner. Think about it this way. If today’s diet wasn’t the cause of obesity or diabetes it, then what did people do 100 years ago when insulin shots were not available? Can obesity and being overweight only be tied to sedentary lifestyle? Third, I have taught you how you can distinguish between beverages with added glucose and ones that are fructose driven. Fructose is tasted at the center to the front of the tongue, and glucose heads to the back. If you want to experiment, go to Krogers and purchase their Private Selection sparkling grape juice, and then purchase Welch’s with added “corn syrup” (glucose), and taste the difference. Kroger’s Private Selection contains sparkling grape juice, potassium metabilsulfite (bacteria inhibitor) and potassium sorbate (yeast inhibitor). Also, see if you get that sugar buzz from the Private Selection versus the other brands.

Our bodies are programmed to seek and consume simple sugars due to their concentrated energy sources.  Simply put, simple sugar foods are not readily prevalent throughout the year in nature.  So when it was available to our ancestors, they relished finding them.  I can only think back to a customer in 2006 who said that Joe’s Jammin’ Red did not affect his sugar levels. I didn’t know why then, but I knew staying natural made reasonable sense. And I did it because I thought it simply tasted better – clean and refreshing and didn’t leave me with that residual cloying sweetness sensation after finishing the beverage.  I just had to figure out why.  Timely filtration and effective cooling are the best tools for making naturally sweet wines.  For instance, I filtered our vignoles 2011 at 3:00 AM this past fall because any later the wine would be drier than I wanted. My condenser is humming away as I type this. Our 2011 concord and Catawba are currently too cold for the yeast to continue to ferment. Additionally, if you try the White Chambourcin 2009, that was a wine that got away from me during the fall fermentation season and became dry. To create a little bit of sweetness in this wine, we waited until the 2010 harvest to obtain our sweetness directly from the vineyard.

Research is seemingly coming out daily about how and what we consume creating both short and long term effects on our bodies.  If you want a good read, check out The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell.  In his book, Dr. Campbell outlines how simple changes in diet can correct all sorts of health ailments that previously a combination of surgeries and medicine corrected or provided relief.  Research is coming out daily (see the link that appeared on Yahoo on 1/31/2012 http://health.yahoo.net/experts/eatthis/3-shocking-soda-facts), on the dangers of the over consumption of glucose, I think it is very important to get this word out.

Sincerely,

Jim Pfeiffer

Owner and Winemaker

Turtle Run Winery