New World Winemaker Blog

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.

Hooo boy – here’s a goody. It is a fact that some wines do show a hot finish; no question. The question is, why. Most people assume the answer is because the alcohol content is high. To a first approximation this is a faulty assumption.

You can do the experiment yourself at home. Go to your wine store and buy five or six different bottles of, say, Chardonnay from different producers, but all with “high” alcohol contents, say, between 14.8% and 15.2%. Taste them blind. I guarantee some will be “hotter” than others.

“Alcohol” in wine is predominantly ethanol: the 2-carbon alcohol which is the primary by-product of the anaerobic metabolism of sugar by yeast. Pure ethanol does not taste “hot” – though it is astringent on the palate (if you were to drink ultra-pure ethanol your mouth would feel dry inside). However, the “alcohol content” of a wine may also include some isomers of higher alcohols – alcohols with 3 carbons or more in their structures – which DO taste very hot. And some of the oxidation products of alcohols (ketones) taste even hotter. In fact, it is the presence of very small quantities of higher alcohols and ketones – which are called “congeners” in distilled spirits – that make a wine taste hot.

So you are wondering why your hot wine has congeners in it. The answer is pretty simple – stressed fermentations. When yeasts are stressed, they start to pump out all sorts of junk, some of which are congeners. Yeasts are neurotic, metabolically speaking – their normal metabolism gets stressed by a whole laundry list of things: extremes of temperature, low nutrients, high sugar, high alcohol, competition with other micro-organisms (including other yeast), natural and man-made toxins, and more, ranging from the increasingly esoteric to the downright speculative.

So here is the indirect link between high alcohol and hot taste: yeast gets stressed out at the beginning of fermentation if the grapes are very ripe (cell biologists call this “substrate inhibition”), and then again at the end of fermentation by the high alcohol produced from high sugar levels (two factors here: end-product inhibition and cell membrane solubilization). Hurt at the beginning and hurt at the end. Double whammy. And if the fermentation sticks (stops before all the sugar is used up) the yeast used to restart the fermentation are stressed from the get-go – leading to a congener production trifecta.

Heaven help us if bacteria start growing at this point. Bacterial growth will further stress the yeast (quadruple toe loop) and the bacteria themselves are capable of churning out all sorts of crud – the very infernal quintessence.

I’m not saying this happens with every high-sugar fermentation, and I’ve already said that not every high-alcohol wine is loaded with congeners. Savvy winemakers can minimize fermentation problems by harvesting before the fruit is over-ripe (or artfully applying the garden hose if the sugar is really high), by inhibiting growth of spoilage organisms with sulfur dioxide at the crusher, by selecting sugar- and alcohol-tolerant yeast, adding vitamins, nutrients and yeast extracts to juice, controlling fermentation temperatures, adding oxygen, and waiting to inoculate with bacteria for malolactic fermentation until after all the sugar is gone.

But there are any number of winemakers out there who are cripplingly limited by their own philosophy. They must wait until the grapes are at 29° Brix to get the flavors they want, and would never use a garden hose. They won’t, or can’t (as in “organic” wine production) add anything to the juice. They live by the cult of “native” fermentation. Or some believe that they have to inoculate for malolactic before the end of primary fermentation to “get it done”.

I’m not being judgy and saying that any of these things is inherently bad, or good. What is certain is that these philosophical predilections can, and frequently do, result in wines with a “hotter” finish.

This blog was originally published July 2006 in John Kelly’s blog: “notes from the winemaker.“