China Opens Draft of New National Grape Wine Standard to Public Feedback

According to an announcement released by China National Standardization of Food & Fermentation on July 10, a new national standard for Grape Wine is open for public consultation from July 10, 2017 to September 10.

The most remarkable changes are that this standard replaces GB 15037-2006 Grape Wine, and will change from a mandatory standard to a recommended standard. Besides, there are some other major revisions in content.

1. Terms and definitions

Firstly, Grape Wine provides some supplementary explanations that concentrated grape juice or white granulated sugar is allowed to serve as external sugar source to enhance alcoholic strength with a maximum concentration of 2.0%vol alcohol.

Besides, additive substances for enhancing sweetness are restricted to concentrated grape juice and white granulated sugar, and the dosage of sugar should be less than 10% of total product weight.

However, the two explanations mentioned above are not applicable to ice wine and botrytis wine.

Definition of “wild grape wine” is deleted and “Chinese native grape wine” is added, including wild grape wine, davidii foex grape wine, etc.

2. Physical and chemical requirements

The maximum limit of citric acid is revised to 1.0 g/L. What’s more, the standard deletes the maximum limit of methanol in grape wine since it is to change into recommended standard, safety index is not required.

3. Determination rules

As for factory inspection items, carbon-dioxide determination is only applicable to sparkling wine, and total plate count is not required any more.

The inspection rate for products belonging to the same category changes from once per half year to once per year.

4. Package

Apart from product name, producer (or manufacture and trader) and address, the outer package should also indicate production license, specification, net weight, and date of manufacture.