Water to wine
Most observers would agree that the style of wine which now dominates the high end of the wine rankings and price scale has evolved over the last couple of decades, toward higher alcohol, higher extract, higher pH and higher levels of new oak. One of the consequences of chasing these high scores is that many winemakers have insisted on leaving the fruit on the vine longer before harvest than before, often to the point that the grapes become partially dehydrated.
In many vineyards, grapes are not truly ripe when the sugar level is just above the minimum contract specification. This is because sugar accumulation is only one component of grape maturation. The skins, pulp and seeds, as well as the acids and salts in the juice, each have maturation curves that are not strictly interdependent or coincident. The flavor of the fruit itself changes as the grapes mature. Fruit can be sweet but not taste ripe, and the evolution of the high-scoring style has put a premium on a flavor profile that tends to the over-ripe. Winemakers may be waiting for a physiological indication of ripeness other than sugar, or they may be waiting for a particular flavor, but they are not waiting simply in order to pay the grower a few percent less.
Bringing in fruit with high sugar content creates potential problems for the finished wine. The first is high alcohol: more sugar means more alcohol produced by fermentation. High alcohol in and of itself is not always a problem, but there is the elusive question of balance to be considered — some wines just taste wrong if the alcohol is too high. The second is the effect on yeast. Dan Berger acknowledges that high sugars can lead to stuck fermentations. I have written before on how high sugar and high alcohol can stress yeast to the point of distress, causing them not only to stop fermenting sugar but also causing them to produce toxins that can make the wine taste hot or that lead to allergic reactions or migraines in sensitive individuals. An uncorrected stuck ferment also means the wine is left with some residual sugar — not a bad thing in itself, as many consumers actually prefer their wines slightly off-dry, but a wine with residual sugar must be sterile-filtered or treated with Velcorin™ if the winery wants to avoid the economic disaster of having it re-ferment in the bottle.
Every vintage, Nature and man conspire to deliver us less than perfect grapes. In waiting for seed ripeness — which is my number one criterion for determining when to pick — the tradeoff may be a higher sugar level. It seems to me that adding some water to the tank is a very minor correction, by which one can avoid too-high alcohols, stuck ferments and their attendant negative effects on wine composition, and filtration or other sterilization. I utterly reject the notion that there is anything deceptive, underhanded or unnatural in this practice.
I expect that winemakers in hotter climates have always been adding a little water to their too-ripe tanks before fermentation. That water addition (along with irrigation) is outlawed in most Continental appellations suggests it has been practiced there as well. However, European vineyards receive more rainfall late in the season than we do here in California. Consequently most European appellation regulations allow addition of sugar before and during fermentation (which is prohibited in California) to bring the potential alcohol of the finished wine back into balance if Nature gives washed-out fruit.
This is an edited version of the original blog posted on John Kelly’s blog: notes from the winemaker.
Grape ripeness and wine alcohol
Are you as tired as I am of all the winging over high-alcohol wines?
Yes some, perhaps many (but not most) wines over — what? — like, 14%-14.5% alcohol by volume? — might strike some tasters as “out of balance.” Certainly any “high alcohol” wine is a risk to drink too much of when one has driven to dinner. But then so are wines with less alcohol, or beers, or cocktails. Yesterday Jon Bonné added to the drone of high-alcohol criticism in his posting to the “Thirst” column at SFGate… with the statement:
The high-alcohol drumbeat isn’t new, but it is prompting more of a backlash. Increasingly, a new guard of winemakers is dismissing old saws about “physiological ripeness.” They’re deliberately, even defiantly, picking grapes with less sugar. Ripeness isn’t California’s challenge anymore; now it’s balance. That means farming smarter. (And not simply removing excess alcohol after the fact.)
I have not met Jon Bonné but I have read him for years — IMHO his writing is often smart and to the point. This bit is not. I’m not sure what “new guard of winemakers” he has been talking to, and I’m not sure what “old saws” he is referring to, but picking grapes solely on the basis of “less sugar” — whether deliberately, defiantly, ignorantly or otherwise — without considering physiological ripeness is definitely not likely to result in a better wine.
I wish (as perhaps does Mr. Bonné) that the definition of “physiological ripeness” for wine grapes was simple and concrete. It is neither. In fact physiological ripeness is an ideal, an unrealizable goal: the perfect overlap of the development of many enologically important components of the grape skin, seeds and pulp. When considering whether an individual grape is “ripe” one could consider the sugars, acids, pH and potassium in the pulp or juice, the anthocyanins and tannins in the skin, the tannins in the seeds, and the aromatic compounds present throughout.
During ripening each of these things is changing with time: some are going up, some are going down, some are going up and then down. “Physiological ripeness” is that moment when all of these things are in “perfect balance” — exactly where they must be to yield a wine of complicated and soul-satisfying deliciousness. Except that it never happens.
In most vineyards, most vintages, some part of the equation peaks too early, or too late. In many California vineyards sugar arrives too early, before the other things that make a perfect wine grape reach their optimal concentrations. It takes some seriously smart farming to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Notice so far I’m still dealing with an idealization — a single wine grape. In the real world each grape on a cluster, each cluster on a vine, each vine in the vineyard is pursuing its own course to “physiological ripeness.” Sure they are all going in the same direction at the same time but like a herd of lemmings running to the sea, some get there before the rest. As a winegrower it is my job to slow that herd up, to bunch them together as much as possible, then snatch them off before most of them have a chance to go over the cliff.
Someday I might write a book on what goes in to assessing grape ripeness and what steps I might take to bunch the crop up. I would include all the other factors that go into the decision of when to pick: things like lignification of the rachis, leaf senescence, disease status, insect pressure, weather forecast, and even the mundane logistical things like the availability of labor, trucking, and tank space. But not tonight.
The bottom line is that no winemaker wakes up one morning during harvest and says “uh, duh-oy — I’m going to pick at lower sugar because high-alcohol wines are really icky.”
If tastemakers want to make high-alcohol wines go away they should stop giving them medals and high point scores. Consumers could make them go away if they would just stop buying them. I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, bashing “the trend toward ever higher alcohols” will continue to be a reliable trope for trade writers to sell a few more column-inches — and to rile up people like me.
This post originally appeared on John Kelly’s blog: “notes from the winemaker.” John Kelly is the owner and winemaker of Westwood wines, Sonoma, California.
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