Honig's 2025 Sauvignon Blanc Discloses Ingredients: Grapes, Yeast and Sulfites

Honig Vineyard & Winery has added an ingredient list to the back label of its 2025 Sauvignon Blanc. It’s the winery’s first wine to carry the information and one of the first in Napa Valley, as Wine Spectator reported. Later releases of Honig’s other wines will carry ingredient labels too.

U.S. law doesn’t require it. Alcohol & Tobacco Tax & Trade Bureau (TTB) has no ingredient-labeling rules for wine; it began discussing them in 2022, but the effort has stalled. Honig made the decision himself after the European Union’s labeling requirements took effect in 2023.

The idea came from a tasting where Honig poured wine next to other drinks. A woman told him she didn’t drink wine, and it wasn’t the taste. “She said, ‘It’s not that I don’t like it. I don’t understand it,'” he recalled. For Honig, that’s the barrier: wine isn’t transparent enough for many people, especially the younger drinkers the industry needs.

Honig says the winery didn’t change how it makes wine before listing the ingredients. It uses bentonite clay to clarify the wine but doesn’t list it, because none is left in the bottle. That’s in line with the EU’s standard of listing only what’s in the finished wine. The winery does list yeast, because yeast explains how grape juice becomes wine.