Spain’s blue ‘wine’ falls foul of wine lobby, name to be changed

Red, white and… not blue: there is no room for blue at wine’s top table, according to officials.

Wine is red, white or – at a push – a frosty pink colour, right? Wrong, actually.

Well, kind of wrong. Last year five young Spaniards launched Gik – a blue-coloured wine made using a selection of Spanish grapes and infused with anthyocyacin, a natural pigment extracted from grape skin that – with a little help of natural dye derived from the woad plant – turned the drink a dazzling shade of electric blue…

Dismissed at the time as little more than a marketing gimmick, Gik managed to confound traditionalists by shifting more than 100,000 bottles in more than 25 countries as the blue drink found a niche market among hipsters and dilettantes the world over.

But now the spoilsports at the Spanish wine lobby have sought to put a cork in Gik’s runaway success by declaring that the drink is not a wine, and cannot be sold or marketed as such.

According to the official regulations, there is no category for blue wine among Spain’s 17 listed wine products laid out in the Annex VII part II of Regulation 1308/2013. Thus, officials have no way of categorising the tipple as a wine, and thus it must be called something else, namely the rather wordy “99% wine and 1% grape must” – a categorisation all of its own making.

The producers, understandably, are not happy. “Drinking Gik is not just about drinking blue wine,” they told The Local. “You are drinking innovation, you are breaking the rules and creating your own ones. You are reinventing traditions.”

They did concede, however, that “there is no revolution without a counter-revolution” – words that nicely sum up how this whole storm in a wine bottle has played out since the product first came to the attention of official wine inspectors last summer.

But if anything, this extra publicity and controversy is likely to prove positive for the makers of Gik. What was once a rather gimmicky take on wine has now become the torch bearer for a whole new drinking category, and one that could trigger a wave of copycat drinks as the sector for almost-but-not-quite-wine learns to stand on its own two, shaky, colourful feet.