Every industry has a darkside...

Wine...an alcoholic drink most people associates with fine dining or good meals. I've never really took the time to care until I started working at restaurant. Yesterday after my classes I had to rush over for a wine tasting clinic my work was putting on. Little did I know how much time and money is put into this fermented fruit. Sitting down in the class I am fist taught the proper way to open and poor a bottle... "you must let the reds breath" I guess letting the bottle sit open for a bit helps the fruit breath? Still not totally sure why.. Next you must twirl it in your class, to mix the flavor? Another action I don't fully understand, yet I was to embarrassed to ask, my co-workers are all very good with wine. For the next hour I was introduced to  MANY different types of wine, cabs, shards, merlot's, malbec's (my personal favorite now) souvignan blanc, syrah, and zins so many different tastes that somehow everyone but me were able to explain, I just sat and answered "yeah, I taste that too". Now with a bit of a buzz I started learning about the dark side of this multi-billion dollar industry. Chaptalization.. a forbidden process in the wine world, this is where you add sugar to your wine because your fruit is not ripe enough. Our instructor with a disgusted look on his face explain how awful this is for the wine industry the wine should be naturally sweet how dare big corp  wine companies do this and now even some vineyards in Washington and Oregon are doing... and starting to pick up in Napa Valley California. But in California it's illegal for this process so the vineyards that are using chaptalization could be fined or even worse closed down.. so why do this? Is it that important to have that much sweeter of a wine or to get the product out quicker instead of waiting for the ripe fruit? Who knows. All I know is this industry  never stood out to me before and now every time I open a bottle I'm going to wonder where it came from and is it a bottle that has cheated the system.