Hey Waiter! There’s alcohol in my wine.

Hey Waiter! There’s alcohol in my wine.

By Ross Workman

It is getting increasingly easy to get an argument going about whether some wines have too much alcohol in them. This is largely the result of New World (read, California) wines being made from grapes picked at a higher degree of ripeness than was traditionally common in Old World (read, European) wines. The argument is usually that the more austere, less ripe style of, say, 11-12% alcohol wines is better to drink with food than is the fruit forward, fully ripened style of, say, 14-15% wines.


Probably the styles resulted from the climates where the grapes were grown, rather than some pre-determined optimal alcohol percentage. More northerly growing areas are generally cooler than growing areas in more southerly latitudes and therefore have a harder time achieving the same degree of ripeness. (Obviously we’re talking Northern Hemisphere here.) Some regions have more cloudy, rainy days during the growing season than other areas do.


It strains credulity, however, to suggest that predominant alcohol levels in a region are the result of testing or comparing various alcohol levels’ compatibility with food and selecting the level which was judged best. It is much more likely that, because the climate resulted in certain alcohol levels in the wines, people got used to how wines of those levels seemed to work with the foods. What was available became what people got used to.


The Old World established the standard wine styles and the New World initially copied them. So 20 or 30 years ago Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon had alcohol levels much closer to Bordeaux cabs than they do today. And they were more austere and came initially with harsher tannins than they do now. California winemakers were probably modeling their wines on the traditional standard setters from Bordeaux.


But, in the last decade or so, New World wines have moved to a riper style with more fully developed phenolic compounds and fruitier flavors that result from picking grapes later and at higher sugar content than was the practice in former times. This style also is capable of producing a more unctuous mouthfeel with polished, gentler tannins than the harder edged, less ripe wines. Since the riper wines are easier to drink closer to the vintage date than they used to be, they allow you to enjoy the fresh, vivid flavors of fully ripened fruit instead of the evolved, but more subdued, flavors of an aged wine.


Many winemakers will argue that this is the natural style for California wines. This is the way wines taste when made from fully mature grapes in the California climate. Full maturity, they will say, may be different another climate, but I’m not making wine there and this is what nature gives me here.


Wine writers and sommeliers that are critical of higher alcohol wines are usually people with highly trained palates who are familiar with a great many more wines than most consumers are. By their trade, they have experience with both New World and Old World styles. What some of them are telling us is that they prefer lower alcohol wines with food. That’s fair enough; we all have our own opinions. How I like my eggs or my steak cooked is purely my choice; there is no right or wrong about it. Same thing goes for wine preferences.


But sometimes the experts’ opinions are put in more categorical terms like “High alcohol wines don’t go well with food,” as if there was some objective standard of what tastes right and wrong to everybody. I don’t know where such a standard would come from and I don’t believe there is such a standard. The only standard of what tastes good to you is what you happen to like.


To see how completely reasonable people can differ about the tastes of wine with food, ask a selection of your wine drinking friends how well they like chocolate with cabernet sauvignon. I know very wine-knowledgeable people with diametrically opposed and adamant opinions on that pairing. And it is not possible to say either group is right or wrong.


I also know a few people who prefer lower alcohol wines, but mostly not for food compatibility reasons. They just feel that their own capacity for alcohol is so low that they feel the alcohol’s effects faster than they want to when they drink riper, high alcohol wines. I drink both high and low alcohol wines and personally don’t find that a 10% wine is any better with dinner than a 15% wine. For me, other factors than alcohol drive my preference for one wine over another.


There is a theory that we humans are hard-wired to prefer ripeness. We certainly do so with the fresh fruits we eat. Everybody prefers a ripe strawberry, melon, peach or grape to an unripe one. And if we prefer ripe grapes to under-ripe ones, it is not surprising that we prefer the wines made from fully ripe grapes instead of wines from not quite fully ripe grapes.


Being used to fully ripened wines, I am often disappointed by the thin flavors and textures of less ripe wines. I suppose if I had grown up on 11% wines I might feel a bit overwhelmed by the big wine style of a 14% cab or a 15% zin. But, fortunately, there is plenty of wine in all styles available, so nobody has to drink what he doesn’t like. We live in a globalized wine market where most of us have a greater selection of wines from all over the world than was ever available to any king, prince or czar of a century ago.


So I think it is pretty pointless to tell people that “High alcohol wines don’t go with food.” For many people they sure as hell do go nicely. And, if they don’t work for you, you don’t have to drink them.


Cheers!


Ross Workman