A Review and Study of Color Standards for White Wines

¹ E. & J. Gallo Winery Laboratory Modesto, California

It appears that one solution to the determination of color in the very limited range of the light white wines in the wine industry might be for the wine industry and other agencies to follow the foregoing procedure. If all concerned would arbitrarily agree on a standard blue filter made to definite tolerances specified to a single filter manufacturer, then, by establishing a given optical density for a sample of a certain depth with a given light source, its strength controlled by an accurate, standardized light meter, a simple determination could be made that would be within the limit of error of most color methods. This would permit the use of inexpensive instruments such as the KlettSummerson colorimeter and at the same time establish an approximate uniformity of reporting among wineries and other agencies in which the relative depth of color of very pale white wines would be more comparable to the action of the consumer's eye to a bottle of wine on the shelf.

As has been pointed out by Amerine ef al, (I), it is only a matter of time until the industry does adopt and use a tristimulus method such as the 10-ordinate method. For the establishment of any strictly regulated color minimums, only a spectrophotometric tri-stimulus method would be satisfactory, for the use of a single blue filter is not broad enough for color determination in all types of white wines.