White wine vinegar

Made from white wine, which has less skin contact than red — the milder of the wine vinegars, though no published salicylate measurement covers vinegar at all, so the category sits on the wine it was made from.

White wine vinegar is doubly fermented like the rest, but it is not aged in wood - it goes from wine to vinegar to bottle - so it lands below the balsamic and sherry end. If you use vinegar at all, the young clear ones are the gentler choice, and this is the plainest of them. Ordóñez measured it among the five and put white wine vinegar with apple and plain Sherry at the LOWEST end for total biogenic amines.

White wine vinegar is the same process on a white base, so two fermentations have run through it. Surveys of vinegars do find biogenic amines, but at levels a tablespoon of dressing does not carry far - the portion is what keeps this low, not the process.

Wine vinegar is a wine that was fermented a second time, so whatever sugar the wine still had went the way of the alcohol. It is the reason a vinegar can be built on a fruit that is difficult on this axis and be easy itself - and the reason balsamic is the exception, because balsamic is cooked grape must and the must was never fermented out.

White wine vinegar: two fermentations leave no fructose behind: the first turns it to alcohol, the second turns the alcohol to acid. What is on the label to watch instead is added sugar or caramel, which some cheaper wine vinegars carry for colour and roundness.