Tom,
I have cut and pasted previous posts from this thread. In answer to your question, NO,, in the US if a label contains "contains sulfites" you can be fairly certain that the winery has added sulfites to the wine,, or wine to the sulfites.
a very small residual of sulfites remain in wine due to the process of fermentation. (less than 10 parts per million). If a winery in France or in Cali tell you that they dont add sulphites, in 99.99% of the cases,, they would be lying to you. A simple way to verify this is to see if the US label says "contains sulphites". In the USA, if a wine contains more than
10ppm free SO2 than it has to be tagged "contains sulphites". Rarely will you have a finished wine that contains more than 10ppm from naturally occuring sulphites. You can then assume that wines tagged "contains sulphites" have sulphites added during processing or botteling by the winemaker. In France, this law does not exist so the French simply tell their customers that they dont add sulphits. After all, this is what the customer wants to hear.I hear alot of winemakers who dont like to admint (for unknown reasons) that they add SO2 directly to their wine so they claim that residual SO2 gets into their wine by using it as a sterilizer. This is even more dubious considering the fact that SO2 is an anti-oxidizing agent and DOES NOT STERILIZE. It is also combined with citric acid and used as a oak barrel treatment where barrel is filled up immediatly after the agent is discarded. When doing this they can still claim that there is no sulfite is added to the wine,, and they are telling the truth,, the wine is added to the sulfites. LOL.
Unless a winery is going after the trendy, yup-yup organic crowed they would definatly add sulphites. Any winemaker who cares about the quality and the longevity of his wines will add sulphites. The additions are crucial to quality winemaking by todays standards.