AUS: Cheap wine gets a make-over

(ABC) - For most people, a cheap bottle of wine is associated with a bland flavour and bad headache.

But now a PhD student from the University of Adelaide is looking to enhance wines in the $10 - $15 range with natural flavours like honey, passionfruit and vanilla.

Yaelle Saltman, a winemaker herself, says natural flavours could be used to add complexity and depth to wine made in a bad vintage.

"For quite a while I've been thinking about what we can do to wines to improve their quality, and yet have consumers still accept those wines.

"This is how I thought about adding something that's normally practised in the food industry and trying it on wine."

Ms Saltman has polled 1300 people, asking them about how they feel about the presence of a range of natural and artificial additives in wine.

She divided the survey group according to their level of knowledge about wine, and then asked them about their acceptance of the approximately 50 existing additives to wine, like tartaric acid.

These people were then asked about how they felt about other wine additives, both natural and artificial.

"The results were really surprising," Ms Saltman says.

"Things that were already added to wine at the moment, like tartaric acid or preservatives most consumers regardless of their knowledge of wine, do not accept them in wines.

"Whereas natural flavourings were accepted."

To further gauge consumer's perceptions of natural flavourings in wine, Ms Saltman conducted a blind taste testing of two Chardonnay and two Shiraz wines, some of which she had added minute amounts of vanilla, honey and passionfruit flavours to.

Ms Saltman says the aim wasn't to make a flavoured wine per se, but to add depth and complexity to wines that had suffered from a bad vintage.