Thursday, August 2 2007
More Alcohol Notes
Yesterday I wrote about Randy Dunn's letter decrying alcohol creep in modern wine. Today I found a great article over at Appellation America (they also feature the Randy Dunn letter and have a great analysis of the issue) about the trend in Napa for De-alcoholising premium wines. (Full disclosure: Winexpert deals with some of the alcohol-mitigation companies mentioned in the article. We don't use their de-alcohol service, but we do buy products from them.)
Now I'm confused: the de-alcoholising folks claim that it's a service that allows winemakers to hang grapes until they're fully 'ripe', while keeping alcohol content below the pain threshold. On the other hand, Randy Dunn says that their grapes are over-ripe, and you can't tell Rutherford Cab from a Stag's Leap, and terroir is out the window, lost in the overdone fruit.
I take his point. In the article he talks about how 'herbaceous' didn't used to be a dirty word when describing wines. When I first started drinking fine wine we did a tasting of a dozen or California Cabernets at my house, including Newton, Beringer, Cakebread, BV, Duckhorn, Kendall-Jackson, Heitz, etc. (what can I say, it was the 80's and a time of wretched excess). I can't recall any of them exceeding 13% alcohol, much less pushing 15.5 like I keep seeing on 'cult' wines from California these days, and all of the wines were good to excellent, even with a herbaceous note or two.
I guess the moral of the story is to make your own, so you can enjoy two or three glasses instead of two or three sips. Now where did I put that (12.9% ABV) bottle of Stag's Leap Merlot?
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