No I think he is probably mistaken here. The ECU should have a realistic ethanol content value stored in its memory to use for start up. Your symptoms sound more like the idle valve set up or pre-crank and post start fuel tuning related. Also keep in mind most engines are a more difficult to cold start on Ethanol based fuels as they are less volatile. This effect gets more worse as temperatures drop so even when all settings are optimised/tuned correctly you will likely never see as good start up behavior as petrol.
