LOOKING FOR LOWER LIKKER
Q: My wedding bottle of Chateau Margaux from the 1960s had an alcohol level of 12 percent. Now I have started to notice alcohol levels of wines up to 14-15 percent. I don’t want that much alcohol and don’t want to drink Riesling all the time. Any suggestions? Why is this happening? Thanks, Ruth in Chicago.
A: Lots is happening, Ruth, from more refined skills in both winemaking and grape growing to global warming. In short, wine grapes are riper and richer (principally in skin color and available phenolics) than they were in the 1960s—or ever.
All that “stuff,” especially fruit sugar, results in higher levels of extract and alcohol after fermentation. It’s basic food science, but, as you find, sometimes unwelcome. Also, some winemakers just love pulling out as much as they can from a given grape that they make into wine.
However, you need not “drink Riesling” only and “all of the time.” Many wines—red, white and pink, both bubbly and still—sport more modest profiles than teeth-staining blockbusters bursting with booze: Vinho Verde from Portugal, for instance, perfumed Pinot Noir from cooler climates such as Oregon, New Zealand, or Burgundy, many sparkling wines from the same regions, or leaner reds and whites that marry food successfully with their humble flavor profiles and moderate alcohol.
They all sit back and let the flavors and textures of the food play against them. So do village-level Chablis, for example, or Mâcon-Villages; a good Grüner Veltliner, the ever-ready rosé. Rioja reds are delish, too, as are many Chiantis and Beaujolais. All these wines still hover around 12-13 percent alcohol by volume, even as the world unwelcomingly warms to growing grapes.
Ruth, I also learned something key about alcohol levels in wine from the winemaker of Pahlmeyer (at the time) Kale Anderson, who taught me “about paying too much attention to the alcohol level in a wine”: He said, “You see the level of alcohol by volume on a label of wine because that’s the law; but there are so many other chemical things that make the wine what it is, such as its acidity, the pH, polyphenols, tannins—more than 20 families of elements. Wine is a synergy of all of these. When one of them is out of whack, then the wine isn’t going to be pleasurable. Looking at alcohol alone is an American reductionist perspective. . . . What if the wine wanted it to be that way? . . . You can have a wine that is at 13 [percent alcohol by volume] that tastes ‘hot,’ but also one that’s 16 that is yummy. It’s about the balance, the ratio, the interaction of all these things that are in the wine.”
To recommend those sorts of wines, seek out a knowledgeable wine merchant. They’re around.