One of the benefits of having old wines in the basement is being able to taste older wines, to see how wines change with time. And not only do the individual wines change, but changes to entire regions take place. Sometimes these shifts in style, in methodologies, in flavors, are dramatic, as when traditional areas such as Rioja or Piedmont stop making wines with marked oxidative character. Sometimes the changes are incremental and unnoticeable, at least for a time.
When it comes to the increases in average alcohol content for most wines, the wine industry has noticed. Some are complaining; most are still withholding judgment, but some of us are not only concerned, we are angry. Highly touted wines, and Turley is more or less the poster child for these sorts of wines, are routinely brought to market with fifteen percent alcohol; some are over sixteen percent. Some fortified wines (fino sherry chief amongst them) have lower levels of alcohol.
California is to blame, some folks opine. It's a hot place (at least viticulturally) and all that sun results in a bunch (or bunches) of sweet, high sugar grapes. Ferment all those many sugars into alcohol (since, after all, it's probably a dry wine that you're after) and you've got enough alcohol to light a crack pipe.
Those who make these monstrosities insist that it is all for the good of the wine. You see, as grapes ripen, it is not only the sugars that increase. Flavors can increase (at least, ripe flavors) color and things we aren't really sure exactly how to place value upon. And some things lessen in this process: acid, for one. Tannin also changes and indeed can lessen, if not in quantity, at least in impact.
The Uber-Ripeners state that they really don't even care how much sugar is in the ripening grape. All they want to know is if the seeds are brown (that's a sign that the tannins and catechins, another bitter element, are changing and, well, ripening, in the vernacular), and if the grape tastes good. At a minimum, they are watching tannins soften and from here we could go hurtling down the rabbit hole of tannic nonsense, pretending to some specificity of gritty tannins versus sandpapery tannins versus fluffy tannins and so on.
Fluffy Tannin, by the way, would be my drag name, if I were to have one.
But I digress. There is no argument, frankly, that Uber-Ripening makes for rounder, riper wines. The complaint is (at least from the mouth of this complainer) that the Uber-Ripe wines all taste the same, raisined, filled with figs, hot, powerful and as windy as a troop of Boy Scouts after a dinner of beanie-weenies.
The Uber-Ripeners say, either you get ripe, delicious wines with high alcohol, or you get thin, astringent, boring wines. And in that, they are not completely wrong. And they are certainly not all right. Things in wine are always varying shades of grey, and never black and white.
But the California wines of yesteryear were not necessarily thin, astringent or boring. What they were, unquestionably, was lower in alcohol however. My few remaining 1968's, 1970's, 1973's and 1975's (yes, I know there should be some 1974's, but we drank all those and besides, they were too high in alcohol. Ooops. I think I just undercut my own argument) are all 12.5% alcohol. It says so right on the label.
Okay, some smart ass out there is snarking that all wines of the day were labeled as 12.5% alcohol, and indeed, the USG (that would be the U.S. gov'mint) allows for a deviation of one and half percent of alcohol from the number on the label. One and half percent?!? That means all those old California wines might in fact be 14% alcohol.
Well, even if it were true (and it ain't true, most of these were indeed 13% or less) that still means these wines were a lot lower in alcohol than the stuff on the shelves today. Yes, their tannins were not as ripe, but it's not like the wines sucked, for chrissakes.
It's not a California problem either. Plenty of Australian winemakers (and a lot of these guys are doing it on purpose, just because Parker and the rest like it like that) are offering freaks of 17% alcohol in some of those bizarre, American oak-smothered non-wines (at least to me) from the Barossa Valley, and other hot places. Think raging steroids. Think steroid rage. Even in cool, northern France, alcohol levels are on the rise. Alsace's two dominators (for many), Zind Humbrecht and Domaine Weinbach, are thoroughly in thrall to the masters of high proof.
You can see where my proclivities lie when you note that I drink about twenty times as much German wine as I do Alsace. And when I drink Alsace, I prefer the traditionalists, though the critics damn them with the epithets, "good", "pleasant" and "interesting". "We want ripe," the critics cavil, even when they won't admit to caviling about the less ripe examples. They might not even complain, but they give them crappy scores, just the same.
Personally, I like balance. Though my palate is only one among many, I tend to recommend wines that I think are balanced, and not just big. Darrel Corti, perhaps America's smartest retailer, has famously refused to stock any wines (of the non-fortified variety) that have alcohols higher than 14.5%. When you're Darrel Corti, you can do that. But knowing that a palate that prefers balance to power is only one palate among many, Winestore still stocks big wines too. And even some of the Uber-ripe types.
Cheers,
Doug Frost
The Timing of our blog post could not have been more interesting:
Famed Priorat winemaker was quoted in an article recently by saying "Wines with higher alcohol are often produced to receive high Parker scores and are harvested later than one would have and are extracted more just to achieve the style Parker prefers."
Robert Parker responded on October 6, 2008 on his website by saying:
"A myth...alcohol has never had anything to do with a wine evaluation unless it is out-of-balance...much like too much acidity,wood,tannin,or dilution....it is always about equilibrium/harmony....moreover...what I have always advocated is full phenolic ripeness....not under-ripeness nor over-ripeness...this is hardly a novel idea...the famous oenologists of Bordeaux( both influenced the modern day generation)...Emile Peynaud and Ribereau-Gayon...were pushing their clients to harvest fully ripe fruit and take a few risks in the 50s and 60s long before I got out of elementary and high school..Seems most of these "perceptions" emerge from those who never have taken the time to read one of my 14 books or 179 Wine Advocates...just an over simplistic...and blatantly incorrect observation totally contradicted by the immense diversity of my wine reviews..."
