Brace yourselves, winos that chilled glass of Chardonnay youre sipping may look white, but its actually red, experts claim.

Scientists have discovered that white grapes contain the same pigments which give red wine its color, implying that white wine may technically not exist at all, NewScientist magazine reports.

What distinguishes red from white is that white wine grapes dont have anthocyanins, said Panagiotis Arapitsas of Italys Edmund Mach Foundation.

Blackberries and Raspberries also get their color from anthocyanins which are naturally colored pigments that represent a part of the protective mechanism of many plants, according to Food Research International.

While connoisseurs will surely be left scratching their heads, vitners and winemakers may finally have an answer as to why they occasionally wind up with a pinkish product.

Sometimes there were producers of white wines who collected white grapes and ended up with a slightly ros wine, Arapitsas said. Now they have some information about why that happened.

Up until now, wine experts believed that white grapes didnt contain anthocyanins. This explains why the wine would sometimes appear more white than red.

Using a process known as mass spectrometry, his team analyzed the skins of grapes from Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling grapes all used in the production of white wine, according to NewScientist.

Arapitsas and his colleagues found that white grapes did contain anthocyanins, but in concentrations several thousand times smaller than the red grape varieties such as Merlot. This is ultimately why the wine is still referred to as white.

See the original post:

White wine is actually red': experts