Thursday, February 24 2011
Missing the (Percentage) Point Completely
A lovely little vintage for those fond of not drinking
Clever readers will know that I'm pretty much dead-set against uber-high alcohol wines. I've given a number of reasons, including the fact that I like the way wine tastes, so a high-alcohol blockbuster means the fun is over too soon (one glass and I'm napping), most high-alcohol wines taste sweet, something I'm not always in the mood for, especially in a red to go with food) and just on general principles: I was raised on good French reds in the 12.5% range and I'm not especially chuffed at higher alcohol as a signifier of quality.
So it was with some irritation that I read Jason Wilson's article over at the Smart Set, On Big and Scary Wines, Or why 14 percent is considered OK, and 14.1 is the end of the world. Jason posted an anecdote about tasting and enjoying a 15.5% ABV wine. The conclusion that he drew from tasting this single wine was that anyone averse to high alcohol wines is hysterical, a 'hater', speaking with 'rancor' and perhaps the most serious and hurtful charge of all, 'Anti-Parker'. Heaven forfend anyone should disagree with the blessed Saint Parker!
Robert Parker, my favorite wine critic. Not shown: puppy he is eating.Wilson's article has a patina of reasonability, but in his failure to understand (or perhaps in an obdurate desire to set up a straw-man and knock it down) he completely misses the point: the problem isn't the difference between 14% and 14.1% (and please, straw man much?) The problem is hanging grapes until they are over-ripe wads of flavourless potential alcohol most often makes uniformly bland wines. Over-ripe grapes don't make bad wine because they deliver too much alcohol. Over-ripe grapes make bad wine because they little or no finesse, a blandness of character and all the subtle and delicacy of a suckerpunch to the genitals. And I don't like getting junk-punched by wine. I'll save that for my next meeting with Parker.
Another few weeks and they'll finally be ripe enough!
Wilson cites Darrel Corti's decision to stop carrying wines over 14.5% alcohol in his high-profile and influential wine store in Sacramento as evidence of Corti starting a 'crusade'.
It’s been three years since wine legend Darrell Corti famously banned wines with more than 14.5 percent alcohol from his family’s venerated gourmet shop, Corti Brothers in Sacramento, California. Though a few notable dissenters piped up — including critic Robert Parker, who called it “appallingly stupid, frighteningly arbitrary, and like some part of a police state’s mentality” — Corti’s crusade was met mostly with applause among the cognoscenti. Decrying high-alcohol wines as “unbalanced” or "fruit bombs" or even "dangerous" became one of the biggest issues in wine. Many sommeliers and shops followed Corti’s lead.
Note the prejudicial language: Corti didn't 'ban' wine. Because neither Corti nor his retail store are dictators, elected officials or any other sort of authority, there is no possibility of enforcing a 'ban'. As an independent retailer he simply chose to stop stocking wines he didn't like. Of course, The Great Satan had to pipe to characterise Corti's completely reasonable, legal and normal action as 'stupid . . . frightening . . . part of a police state's mentality' just to show he understood how specialty retail works (I manage a retail store. I wish I had the powers of a police state. I'd order people to buy more stuff, address me as 'Your Magnificence', and take Wednesdays off to oppress my workers and chortle with fat-cat retail cronies).
Wilson goes on to quote Lettie Teague's column in the Wall Street Journal (full disclosure: I've spent a few hours in the company of Lettie Teague and have a wine crush on her. She's a lovely person and a great critic). She notes that she has a number of wines in her cellar above 14% alcohol that she likes and questions the arbitrary nature of a rejection of wines above that point. She does use the word 'banned' in relation to Corti's action again, which makes me wonder about a shared playbook somewhere.
But Teague's cherry-picked counter-examples don't represent the real problem with high-alcohol wines: they're all more-or-less cut from the same bland cloth of overwhelming fruit, and power without character. They're the vinous equivalent of piling horseradish on your roast beef sandwich (I'm stealing this example from Terry Pratchett, because it's brilliant and he's a much better write than I will ever be). Horseradish is a powerful flavour that's heady, redolent and (in my books) delicious. But if you really like it, one day a spoonful isn't enough to cut the mustard, as it were, and pretty soon you're piling on more and more to get that same kick, until one day you see that the beef slipped out a long time ago and you're eating nothing but horseradish between two slices of bread.
Subtle, yet full-bloodied. Photo by Matt Wilson, vectored via RedditWhich brings us to Alder Yarrow. He wrote a blog back in 2008 which Wilson claims as inspiration,Stop Whining About High Alcohol Wines. The post doesn't start out well, with Yarrow characterising those who favour lower alcohol levels as 'whining', 'tiresome' and 'just plain silly'. He goes on to cite how some high alcohol wines can be tasty.
He does make an initial point that's very important, and one that I agree with: alcohol is not the sensation people dislike. In fact, the 'hot' or burning character of alcohol is conveyed by the trigeminal sense, not the taste buds, and it doesn't kick in until over 18% ABV, so none of the wines that I find flawed are have taste flaws due to alcohol content. I'm with him so far.
Next, he says "High Alcohol" Wines Can Be Great Wines. Some can, sure. But they can be crappy too. The plural of anecdote isn't 'data', and if he's not going to accept my assertion that I've had more unsatisfying high-alcohol wines than satisfying ones, I'm not accepting his that high alcohol is all lovely and wonderful.
The next point is both straw-man, gross generalisation, an appeal to authority (his) which I find absurd. He says,
I'd bet good money that most (say 95% of) wine consumers, even those who buy wines in the "super premium" $20 and above categories pay absolutely no attention to the alcohol levels in their wine when they buy it. And furthermore, they couldn't possibly tell you, if tasting a bunch of wines, which ones had higher alcohol and which ones didn't. Which is to say that 99% of the time, they wouldn't even notice that a wine they happened to be drinking was 15.2% alcohol.
NOTE: Bits of the following section have been edited to remove content which was not cogent to the discussion, and which was unfair towards Alder Yarrow. He didn't ask me to take it out, but in looking at it I realised that it wasn't worthy of an honest discussion of the issue, it was unnecessary and it was actually quite jerky. Mea culpa, and I've apologised to him directly.
Then he goes on to further generalisations.
Even if most wine drinkers did know that their wine was high in alcohol, they couldn't care less. Have you ever noticed how many people drink martinis and Mojitos and cosmopolitans with their food? Clearly Americans could give a rats ass about whether their drinks make their food taste better and vice versa. Clearly this is disappointing for those of use who enjoy the occasions when a great wine can make a meal that much more exciting, but we are a minority of the wine drinking public and the wine buying market.
I'd have to suggest that in the context of a debate about whether or not high-alcohol wines are worthy examples of wine-qua-wine, invoking Martinis and Mojitos is a little confusing. People who drink mixed cocktails are usually drinking for effect. The entire concept of the cocktail is a way to convey alcohol for social purposes, not to enjoy levels of subtlety and the beauty of the grape (although some cocktails are delightfully subtle and worthy of contemplation). People consuming cocktails with their meals are not the target consumer of critical thinking about wine: they're just having a drink.
There's something else I object to, and that's the idea that cocktails are much stronger than wine. According to the National Institutes of Health and the US Government's department of Health and Human Services, a Mojito has less alcohol than one of the over-ripe wines I dislike. Don't believe me? Check out the Cocktail Content Calculator over at their website. A Mojito has 13.3% alcohol, a Gin and Tonic has 13.6% and while a Martini does have 31.1% alcohol yes, but it's a serious drink, and you don't belt them down with dinner unless you like napping in your meatloaf. A more cordial sort of drink that people have with food, the Screwdriver, has only 11.4%.
I should cut Yarrow some slack, as he and I are both bloggers and not journalists, and virulent disagreement over opinions doesn't serve any of our readers well. I certainly I agree with his final thought:
Sure it's fine to try to make better wine at lower alcohol levels if that's what you want to do. Sure it's fine to only want to drink wines like that. But for Pete's sake people, let's find something better to whine about.
Okay, I agreed with it until the final sentence. I can't think of anything better to discuss than wine I like or don't like, and characterising my dismay over the shift to clumsy, over-ripe tasting wines as 'whining' is what set me off in the first place. Disagreement is not whining: whining is that action of spoiled children or people who don't get their way and can't be adult about it, and characterising the other side of a debate as whining isn't a great way to frame a position.
Anyway, back to my original object of irritation, Jason Wilson. He winds up his opus with this:
At a wine writers conference in Napa this past February, I witnessed an interesting j’accuse exchange. Author and winemaker Jeff Morgan told the audience of assembled writers that — due to the current ultra-ripeness of Napa Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir grapes — 80 percent of winemakers “water back”, or add water, to lower the alcohol content of their wines. “That’s because of wine writers bashing high-alcohol wines,” Morgan said.
“Well, they should be [bashed]!” shouted Bruce Schoenfeld, the wine editor of Travel + Leisure. “If you have to water back, maybe you should grow your grapes somewhere else.”
“Well, in France, they add sugar to get their alcohol content up,” retorted Morgan, reminding us that chaptalization (adding sugar to unfermented grape must) is legal in France but illegal in California. “So maybe they shouldn’t grow grapes in France if they have to add sugar to make 12 to 13 percent wine?”
Where to start. First, characterising the exchange as 'j'accuse' is interesting. It's from Émile Zola's open letter to the President of France decrying the Dreyfus affair. Without going all history on you, it's a story of a monstrous miscarriage of justice, retribution, recrimination, and a corrupt and prejudiced system. Wow, that's a lot to hang on an exchange between a winemaker and a wine editor. To be fair, perhaps he was using it in some other sense . . . although I can't think of one, sorry.
Moving along, Jeff Morgan was being disingenuous in that exchange. Watering back is a perfectly valid technique, and if it made the wine worse, no winemaker would do it--seriously, he's blaming wine critics for his over-ripe grapes? In one breath winemakers claim they don't listen to Parker and make the wine they want, and in the next they claim wine critics are dictating that they add water? Wha? Wasn't he listening to Alder Yarrow back in 2008? Or Lettie Teague in 2010?
Schoenfeld has an excellent point, however: if your site will only produce over-ripe examples of the grape that require water-back (or worse, a trip through Clark Smith's de-alcoholizer-o-matic), you should look at relocating your vineyard or resigning yourself to making over-ripe wines.
But the sweetest thing is when Morgan retorts about the sugar. Ah, ha ha ha ha! Yes, they add sugar to wine in France. And it's legal. And it serves to make wines with a balanced alcohol content--after all, alcohol delivers flavour and adds sweetness to wine. Added judiciously, sugar can increase the alcohol content (usually by a maximum of 2%) up to 12% in whites and 12.5% in reds. A quick check on Wikipedia notes:
In the United States, federal law permits chaptalization when producing natural grape wine from juice with low sugar content. This allows chaptalization in cooler states such as Oregon . . . However, individual states may still create their own regulations; California, for example, prohibits chaptalization, although California winemakers may add grape concentrate.
Rectified grape concentrate, clear as water and free of any flavour or aroma is just like liquid sugar--that's why they use it in 'naturally sweetened' breakfast cereal, because it tastes and performs like sucrose-fructose. And you can add it in California. Know what you can't add in France? Acid. And ultra-ripe grapes in California require shovel-fulls of acid to bring their pH down and to keep them from tasting like pancake syrup and being just as brown (a pH thing). I'm not really sure that Morgan scored any points here with that exchange, whether or not he was in a j'accusey or a hot tub.
Anyway, what was my original point? Oh yes: high alcohol wines aren't a problem. They're a symptom.
Super-high alcohol wines, or wines that require water-back or post-fermentation alcohol reduction mostly appeal to a palate of excess: too much fruit, too much sloppy over-soft tannins, too much enveloping, overwhelming sweetness. It's not that such wines are universally unwelcome, but too many of them are like modern junk-food, which is an amalgam of sugar, fat, sodium and savoriness designed to appeal to the most common and child-like of palate preferences on a level below the conscious. They're not delightful wines by design, they're designed to smother the drinker in over-intensity. Even if I taste a 16% ABV wine and enjoy the first sip, they are never, ever refreshing. And what's the point of drinking if not to refresh ones self? You might as well just open a vein and shoot the booze in and suck on a cup of grape juice concentrate.
But maybe I'm just an old grump, pining for the days of my 12.5% Cabs, crusty and out of touch. Let's check in with a much more prominent critic and see what he thinks, as of this morning. In the New York Times, March 1st, 2011, Eric Asimov and his tasting panel reviewed a bunch of 2007 Napa Cabs Under $100. Here's what he had to say:
. . . we were disappointed to find so many uniform, monochromatic wines with little finesse. The fear of making wines that could possibly be termed “green” has led most Napa producers to forsake any semblance of the herbal flavors that were once integral to cabernet sauvignon wines. Instead of complexity, the rule seems to be all fruit, all the time, with power deemed preferable to elegance.
“Most seem made to fit a profile, in a commercially successful style,” Scott said.
It’s hard to argue with success, and no, this is not a new story. But it continues to disappoint me, even as I know that some Napa producers are aiming for more subtlety and nuance.
Hmm. One can hardly criticise Asimov's tasting expertise (although I do, because that's the kind of guy I am) or depth of experience. He's not complaining about alcohol, although the wines he's referring to have high ABV's. Instead, he's lamenting the bland sameness of over-ripe wines made from over-hung grapes. And there you have it, the real problem, framed by a real critic: bland, monochromatic wines without finesse.
And that's the point, not the percentage.
| Posted by Over-ripe Tim AT 4:47PM | 7 Comments |  |
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Comments
Alder
Posted 1 year ago
Tim,
I think you've mis-read part of my screed. That paragraph that starts "I'd bet good money" isn't about invalidating the knowledge of anyone, it's pointing out the fact that most consumers pay very little attention to their wine. Anyone reading a wine blog distinctly does NOT fall into that category. If you think about the folks that have made Turning Leaf Merlot one of the top selling wines in America because they buy it by the case at Vons, and when they go out for a special dinner they buy a bottle of Jordan Cab or if they're splurging, Silver Oak off some restaurant wine list... Those are the folks I'm saying pay zero attention to alcohol levels in wine, and wouldn't know the difference between 13.9 and 15.2. There's no implicit or explicit value judgement in that, it's just my assessment of the "average" wine drinker.
You don't seem to make the distinction between the group of us wine lovers/geeks/collectors/bloggers and the group that drinks most of the wine in this country. And you need to.
Here's evidence of your failure to do so. In objection to my invocation of cocktails-with-meals as proof that people don't care about alcohol-with-food issues you write: "People who drink mixed cocktails are usually drinking for effect. The entire concept of the cocktail is a way to convey alcohol for social purposes, not to enjoy levels of subtlety and the beauty of the grape (although some cocktails are delightfully subtle and worthy of contemplation). People consuming cocktails with their meals are not the target consumer of critical thinking about wine: they're just having a drink."
The average wine drinker drinks wine for exactly the same reason you describe people drinking cocktails -- except they just happen to think wine tastes better. And the average wine drinker is most certainly NOT the target consumer for critical thinking about wine either. It's just a drink to them. One they happen to like, but one that they don't particularly like to think a lot about. They don't subscribe to the spectator, they don't read your blog (or mine), and many of them can't name more than a couple grape varieties off the top of their heads, and they're fine with that. And so am I.
Finally, you're free to suggest that I'm wrong about the alcohol content of drinks (I'm a wine blogger after all, not a cocktail blogger) but don't make me laugh by citing the NIH on what the strength of the drinks are in this country where there are zero regulations on standard pours, etc. Anyone's even limited anecdotal experience will prove that a mojito is not a mojito is not a mojito. Sure some probably are close to 10%, and I've had some that could tranquilize a cow.
I'll go out on a limb and agree with you. You are " just an old grump, pining for the days of my 12.5% Cabs, crusty and out of touch."
LOTS of people love the "too much fruit, too much sloppy over-soft tannins, too much enveloping, overwhelming sweetness" of big wines. There's nothing wrong with that.
And lots of higher alcohol wines don't come anywhere near that description. Which brings me back to my point, which you seem to agree with. All too often people conflate characteristics like you describe above with high alcohol. There can be a definite correlation, but they are not inextricably linked. Which is why people need to stop with the "high alcohol" bashing, and start with the point you end on, which will get a hallelujah from this choir: enough with the "bland sameness of over-ripe wines made from over-hung grapes."
John Meola
Posted 1 year ago
Good points. But, my understanding is that a certain amount of these high-alcohol wines are the result of climate change in traditional grape-growing regions. With hotter, dryer weather becoming the norm, grapes develop concentrated levels of sugar. From that comes the higher alcohol levels in the wine.
In any event, I do miss ~12% ABV wines.
Tim Vandergrift
Posted 1 year ago
Alder,
First, thanks for your detailed reply: I appreciate the feedback, and appreciate getting a feel for what you intended in your original blog post.
I see where you're coming from with the idea that some consumers pay little attention to the details of their purchases. It's easily demonstrable that many folks aren't very observant about the actual details of the things they buy (viz: fast-food restaurants still thrive). But as a purveyor of consumer goods, and someone charged with explaining the relative merits and benefits of those goods I cringe when I perceive a denigration of ordinary people's behaviour. As wine writers it's our job to educate, inform and assist people to make good choices. Being dismissive of some subset of consumers is a very slippery slope to an elitist view of us (wine cognoscenti) and them (the vast unwashed whose opinion is worthless). That's pretty sad. I started out as a baseline consumer, drinking what was popular and learned as I went. I'd like to think that everyone has the same chance to become more mindful of what they drink rather than belonging to a pool of happy, shallow Eloi.
My refusal to distinguish between ‘us wine lovers/geeks/collectors/bloggers' and the rest of the wine consuming public is a deliberate choice, not a failure of understanding. It seems paternalistic and condescending to aver that everyone but a self-defining nomenklatura simply drinks without thought. Who decided that?
I'm pretty sure we're not going to agree on this. I have the (probably romanticised) view that wine can serve as an entrée into an enlightened and enriching experience, that it doesn't have to be a substitute for milk, coke, iced tea or bourbon in some thoughtless lout's glass. Yes, there are consumers out there that have lower levels of wine knowledge than yours or even my small awareness, but I don't think they're so thoughtless or clueless as to have no hope or potential. And I don't think you or I have the right to take their ignorance or unworthiness for granted.
Sorry you dispute the NIH data on the relative alcohol strength of drinks. However, there's no other credible source, and while yes, I've had very strong drinks and much weaker ones, no matter how many cocktail stories we have between us, the plural of ‘anecdote' is not ‘data'. Those are standard bar-book recipes. Maybe our drinks are weaker in Canada?
Moving on, I very much agree that there's nothing wrong with people liking big fruit-sloppy wines. I'd be some kind of a hypocrite for telling people they can't drink whatever they like. But I've been making and selling wine for nearly thirty years, and watching the escalation of ripeness and concomitant alcohol increase that's come in the last three decades, I'm strongly convinced that it's correlated to the diminishment of a style I think has so much to offer: delicacy, herbal notes, gentle fruit and subtlety, like your Chinon (man, I wish I could get more Loire reds around here) or the To Kalon Asimov mentions.
If I was to sum up my own thoughts on those uber-ripe styles it would be that they strike me as a sort of reversion to childhood tastes. Children on the whole like very sweet, not very challenging flavours, and modern food and drink manufacturers have catered to them by and large as they have grown up into adults, and thus sugar and corn syrup are in everything from hamburger buns to supposedly healthy yogurt. There's so much more underneath the ultra-ripeness and overbearing fruit that could be intriguing and challenging palates everywhere, but it's not going to show if everyone is scrambling to make as ripely sweet a wine as possible.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment.
Tim Vandergrift
Posted 1 year ago
John,
Climate change is a factor in ripeness levels, yes. But people have been growing grapes in the south of France, in Algeria and in Southern Australia very successfully for long periods. There are ways to manage heat units--admittedly they work better if you can get up in the mountains, not so much if your on the flats or in a valley, but grapes can come to organoleptic ripeness in extreme heat without becoming sugar-bombs, if you're a very tricky and subtle grower.
There are still many imported wines in the 12.5% range. I'm not sure what the inter-state commerce laws are where you live, but maybe you need to talk to Corti about some of their selections.
Cheers, and give my best to your lovely wife.
Matt Reese
Posted 1 year ago
Hi Tim,
This was another enjoyable article that I found particularly timely. First, I'd like to thank you for your approach of educating the masses with an optimistic and "paternal" mindset. Your personal experiences seem to give you a humble grasp of wine drinkers of all levels of wine knowledge. After all, everyone starts with none at some point.
Just as you mentioned, I also started off with a narrow appreciation of wine. Perhaps I only started drinking it because my parents had. As time went by, though, something compelled and intrigued me to learn more. Now, I seem to be the most hungry to gain wine knowledge out of my circle of friends and family. I also live in an often pretentious area, Southern California, where people like to act like they know everything about everything. However, it amazes me how eager people are to learn more about wine when you offer a friendly and knowledgeable source. I believe that some people do fall into the category that Alder places them. My experience, though, suggests that the complex and often intimidating subject of wine is one that the majority appreciates learning more about.
Short story long, wine experts, bloggers, and blog readers may discuss wine with a more elitist point of view, but the average consumer has their own way of appreciating wine. They just want to find a way to enjoy it and learn something about it without being made to feel unworthy or inferior.
I recently turned thirty and still don't even have ten years of wine experience under my belt. There is so much more that I'm excited to learn. You may recall that I recently embarked on my first batch of Pinot. In fact, I just bottled it last night. In my opening comments, I said your post was timely. The reason I feel that way is because when tasting my Pinot a couple of weeks ago, one of the first things I noticed was that it felt less hot, less alcoholic than most Pinots. Perhaps my inexperience with winemaking and kits is showing, but the 1-2% less alcohol in my 12.5% kit is refreshing! (literally and figuratively) And, since I wasn't quite looking for something that resembles a Beaujolais Nouveau, I can't wait for it to be done laying down for a bit.
Cheers to a great post! (and watch that sucker punch to the genitals)
Thanks for your comments, Matt. I try as hard as I can to avoid a paternalistic bent when it comes to wine opinions. It's pretty hard though when you've been a wine educator as long as I have--after all, how could people disagree with me, since I think I'm so smart?
But if there's one thing I have learned after all these years, it's that no wine ever tastes the same to everyone. Another lesson is that just because my taste is different, it isn't better in a Platonic sense, it's just better for me. I may think over-ripe wines are simplistic and sad, but I'm not the boss of anyone's drinking habits.
You put your finger right on it: that twelve-and-a-half Pinot you made isn't better because the alcohol is moderate. It's better because it tastes refreshing and offers interesting flavours and aromas not swamped by cooked fruit and sugar. And if that's appealing to you, then I'm a happy guy, because that's how I'm going to keep making 'em.
Cheers, and Happy Winemaking.
Jean Newbold
Posted 1 year ago
I completely agree with Tims analogy (to some degree) that there are many wines with alcohol levels higher than the standard 11.5% to 13% that can taste bland and flavourless. Being a Winexpert Retailer we have several wines that are in the 13.5% to 15% alcohol range like an fabulous Amarone. I would prefer my wines to be in the 8% range then I could just continue drinking all night but unfortunately I think I am out of luck.
I am sure Tim is talking about LCBO wines that are overly bland when too high in alcohol as I can attest to the fact after consuming HUGE amounts of higher alcohol Winexpert reds, that they are in no way anything other than beautifully balanced and supreme !
Cheers
The Winelady
Jean,
The Amarone is an excellent example of a high-alcohol wine that doesn't display over-ripe characters--I'm so glad you brought it up. Amarone is made when a portion of the ripe-but-not-overripe grapes (Crovina, Rondinella and Molinara) are taken aside from the harvest and placed on straw mats to dry into raisins. The bulk of the harvest is crushed and fermented as normal. When fermentation dies down, the raisined grapes are added.
Being raisined they have higher sugar levels, yes, and more importantly they have a much higher ratio of skin and seed material to pulp volume, meaning they achieve a much higher level of extract, driving fullness, body and tannin. What they don't have is higher levels of organoleptic ripeness--they didn't ripen on those mats, they just dried up. So the resulting wine has high alcohol, and a high level of extract, but it doesn't taste like barbecue sauce with vodka in it. A win all around, as far as I'm concerned.
I just did a tasting event for some folks and one of the wines I used was a passimento, like Amarone and everyone was initially intimidated by the alcohol content. We had already tasted 17 wines and they were not looking forward to a challenging blockbuster. When they tasted it, however, most of the class were excited by a high-alcohol red that was lively and balanced (albeit a little raisiny and very full-flavoured). High alcohol can be great, done right.
I'm with you on 8%. I think a lot about what it means to drink wine. After all, I promote wine and a wine lifestyle to people so I'd better think about it, and one of the questions I always ask about a new wine we are developing is: 'If this didn't contain alcohol, would people still like to drink it?' If the answer to that isn't yes, then it's a serious problem. I've come around to the point of thinking that if there was a way to remove 100% of the alcohol from wine (without affecting the flavour, of course), I'd probably drink a lot more than I do now.
Wine is a healthy and gracious part of a diet and lifestyle, but you can only consume so much before it begins to affect your behaviour, your health and your future. If there was no danger of becoming intoxicated I'd dump out my travel mug in the morning and fill it with non-alcoholic Stag's Leap Merlot for the drive to work.
Man, that's a world I could live in . . .
Tim
Posted 1 year ago
Very interesting commentary over at the San Francisco Chronicle (http://tinyurl.com/46kynh5)
The author, Jon Bonné sums up what a lot of observers have concluded:
What's quietly losing favor, then, are those inky, oak-loaded Pinots made for flash and impact, for success with a handful of critics who are slowly fading into the background. These wines have contributed to the de-Pinoting of Pinot as much as the bottom-shelf stuff.
Mercifully, a growing number of vintners have publicly retrenched - like Adam Tolmach of the Ojai Vineyard, who deliberately decided to pick his grapes earlier and make less alcoholic wines, and Wells Guthrie of Copain, who walked away from vineyards he found too ripe.
The results could be tasted in Tolmach's 2008s, which balance Santa Barbara opulence with a tangy freshness; and in Copain's 2009s, which landed in the 13 percent range and burst with heady spice and stunning acidity. Guthrie says his alcohols will be even lower in 2010.
So why is this scuffle being aired after years of closed-door squabbles? For one, we can now picture a future in which Pinot masquerading as Zinfandel is properly kicked to the curb. The argument that California's Pinot signature is "big fruit" - and that those who disagree are Burgundy-swilling jihadists - has worn out.
Second, those alcohol concerns are real, and echoed by a growing number of readers who want to know the alcohol levels in wines we recommend (still debating that, folks). Yes, wine's firepower is only part of the equation, but it's a part people care about.
Nicely put. I'm tired of the worn-out argument that any rejection of wine made from over-ripe fruit makes me a fool or an extremist, and I'm happy some great producers are working to produce alternatives to the oak-and-ink tide that has swamped California Pinot Noir in recent times.