Grape concentrate and colour (Mega Purple)
The colour of a red wine comes from grapes: from the skins, from teinturier varieties (grapes with red flesh as well as red skin), from blending, and from grape concentrate. True colour additives are a separate category, and in EU wine almost entirely forbidden: the only colourings the EU list authorises are the four caramels (E150a to E150d), and only in liqueur wine ?.
What Mega Purple is
Mega Purple is a grape juice concentrate, not a colouring and not a skin extract. Trade press reports it is made from Rubired, a teinturier grape, concentrated to about 68 °Brix (Dan Berger, Wines & Vines, 2006; Jamie Goode, 2011). Its maker, Vie-Del Company, which bought it from Constellation Brands in 2020, publishes no composition or dose. Grape skin extract (enocianina) is a different product, and in the US a different legal category: an FDA-listed colour additive.
It deepens colour, and it adds real sugar and body, not just a “perception” of sweetness. As our own estimate (not a published figure): at 68 °Brix, each 1 mL per litre of wine adds roughly 0.9 g/L of sugar.
How much is used
No dose is published by the maker. Reports from winemakers, as a share of the finished wine, run from 0.06 % to 0.2 % (0.6 to 2 mL/L), with sweetness obvious near 0.45 % (Berger, 2006, anecdotal); Goode (2011) gives 0.2 % as typical. These are reports, twenty years old, not a specification.
How widely it is used is contested. The often-repeated claim that “virtually everyone” uses it is one source's opinion from 2006; no production or usage figure has been published.
EU wine
Mega Purple cannot be used in EU wine. Grape juice and concentrated grape juice may not be made into wine or added to it, and no grape must, concentrate or juice from outside the EU may be added either (Reg (EU) No 1308/2013, Annex VIII Part II B.2 and B.5) ?.
What EU wine may use is concentrated grape must (CGM) and rectified concentrated grape must (RCGM), made in the EU ?. Both count as enrichment, within the zone's limit, and may raise the initial volume by at most 11 %, 8 % or 6.5 % in zones A, B and C ?; or they sweeten, raising the total alcoholic strength by at most 4 % vol ?. CGM made from teinturier grapes brings colour too.
US wine
In the US, grape concentrate is concentrated juice of the same kind of fruit, a normal ingredient of natural wine: allowed at the start of fermentation, to chaptalize up to 25 °Brix, and to sweeten within the total-solids limits (27 CFR 24.176, 24.177, 24.179) ?.
On the label
- EU: CGM and RCGM are ingredients and must be listed, as “concentrated grape must”; RCGM may use its own name. Neither may be called “sugar”, which is for sucrose only ? ?.
- US: there is no ingredient list. The label must declare sulfites, FD&C Yellow No. 5 and cochineal or carmine; it need not mention concentrate ?.
- Australia and New Zealand: wine is exempt from the statement of ingredients (Food Standards Code, Standard 1.2.4, as reported; we have not re-read the Standard). Allergen declarations still apply.