We haven’t really admitted it to ourselves, but we seem to like our red wines really red these days. So why do wineries use it? And why are they so freaked out about us finding out? One major factor is that visual/marketing thing. Mega Purple, looking quite mega, photo courtesy of It’s so “mega,” that’s all you really need. If and when Mega Purple is used, which is a lot, it’s generally used in extremely low doses. To make Mega Purple, Rubired grapes are prepared into a kind of wine with a ton of residual sugar (about 68 percent) and a very rich color.

We just don’t really talk about some of them, like Mega Purple, the nightmare-Barney-sounding grape concentrate thousands of wineries quietly use to “color correct” their bottles. Made from a teinturier grape called Rubired, Mega Purple is extremely rich in color (“teinturier” is the French word for a grape with both red skin and red flesh, hence its ability to add deep hue). Not that we don’t talk about any wine additives.

It’s just not talked about, at least not so much that we all get really worked up and charge the nearest chateau, demanding answers. All the flavor we’re looking for could already be in the bottle but the producer knows we associate complexity and style with a particular hue. Which is why something like whiskey, one of the most revered distillates in drinking history, is very often “corrected” with caramel coloring.

The same is true in beverage - yes, even in the age of rampant “craft,” when we’re all thirsting for authenticity, we’re also tweaking the visuals for marketing purposes. Visuals are a messaging shorthand, often used to impart a sense of quality. We live in a hyper-visual, hyper-commercial world where everything from hamburgers to depression medication is marketed to us with a strong aesthetic component, such as when the depressed woman is finally hopeful again, a window shade opens up (yay!) and maybe we notice her teeth look a bit whiter. You know how you go for the slightly shinier apple, or get (briefly) bummed when the Big Mac in your hands looks absolutely nothing like the Big Mac in the commercial? Like it or not, aesthetics factor into consumer judgment as much as - often more than - substance.

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