COMMENTARY
The Problem with Alcoholism Levels:
Two Views of an Ignored Element

[The following is a fascinating article by Dan Berger (who also wrote the humorous article on the Stages of Wine Drinking). This edited version starts with an extended discussion of the wine lover’s use of alcohol for alcohol’s sake and finishes with a riveting look at the alcohol levels with which California wine makers are confronted.] 

   Wine is a product that gives us joy in many ways, with its color that resonates in sun and candlelight; with aromas that are reminiscent of greater days in our youth or of flowers or music or dreams; and with tastes that conjure up images of romance, or history or moods we’ve known and experiences we treasure.
   The one element of wine whose existence we reluctantly admit to, is its absolutely mundane, basic ingredient that is virtually identical in all wine: alcohol. Wine without alcohol is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Sure, I know, people have taken wine and used various techniques to remove all the alcohol and called it “de-alcoholized wine.”
   I find this an absurd concept, not to mention an absurd product. I understand it has its place, but to me this is not wine. I am realistic, however, and I suppose there is no alternate term for a no-alcohol grape-based fermented and then de-alcoholized beverage. The term “unwine” comes to my mind. (How about “grape-spawned product” or “naturally fermented, defanged liquid” or “toothless irrigant” or “emasculated moistenant?”)
   To call such a product a de-alcoholized wine is silly. Wine needs alcohol the way a clock needs moving hands. (Moving hands are needed to record the seamless sweep of history in our lives. Digital time-keeping instruments ought not to be called clocks.)
It’s the way we define our lives that defines who we are, and for me, no wine is wine unless it has some alcohol. And the fact is, I like alcohol and what it does for me.

The Andrews Essay
   My colleague Coleman Andrew, in a brilliant essay a few years ago, spoke of his right as an American to get drunk if he desired. He spoke of his love for the effects of mild alcoholic use, generally in moderation. I loved the essay. It was one of those pieces I wished I had written. For in many of its points I found a bit of my own personal philosophy. It acknowledged alcohol’s great benefits in our lives.
   I consider alcohol - the alcohol in a bottle of excellent wine - to be my drug of choice. A professor of Psychiatry at UCLA some years ago showed how all animals will seek stimulation and satisfaction in various forms of drugs. In this regard, mankind is not significantly different from other animals. My “opiate” of preference is that mild sedative, the alcohol in a glass of wine. Or two.
   Note that like marijuana and some other illicit drugs, alcohol is not a stimulant; it is a relaxant. And, certainly, you could argue, and many do, that alcohol is a danger to society, and so it is. That’s obvious. Used without knowledge of its true effects and impact, and without a sense of responsibility, alcohol ingestion can be disastrous. Drunken driving statistics, even though they may be inflated by inexact counting methods, nevertheless are powerful reminders that inappropriate alcohol use can have awful consequences. And anyone who has tried to resolve a morning-after binge induced headache knows the agony of an excess of alcohol.
   But as we all know, the inappropriate use of virtually anything can lead to disaster. The case a decade ago in Texas (Amarillo, I think) where a man died after consuming an excessive amount of water in a short period of time proves the point. Yet following that admittedly bizarre incident, no one suggested a warning label be mandated for every faucet in the country.

My Almost Daily Unwinder
   With relatively full knowledge of the dangers and limits of alcohol, I approach wine with pleasure, for that’s what it gives me. At the end of a day fighting traffic, crowds, laundry, editors and deadlines, kid’s homework assignments and next-day lunches, and when I am finally, at peace preparing dinner in the kitchen, I take great solace in that first glass of wine for the evening. I love the sound of the cork being extracted from the bottle with a familiar thock. I cherish the aroma of a fine wine with fruit; I love that first sip to gauge nuance, then the second to see what the weight is in the mouth, then another to assess the texture.
   By the time the salad is in the bowl, more garlic than I care to admit has been squeezed into the salad dressing jar, and the main dish ensconced in the oven, about a third of my bottle is already gone. And the joys of dinner preparation have taken on a higher aspect.

    You might argue that my appreciation of those dinner-preparation sips of wine are not related directly to alcohol, that they are a part of that less than 1% of flavoring imparted to a wine by the grapes and other processes to which it is subjected. That after we eliminate the relatively neutral aroma and taste effects of raw ethanol (7% to 14%) and the 85% to 92% water, there is 1% or less of flavoring that gives all wines their distinctive characteristics.
    This is true, of course. Yet, all attempts thus far to make a de-alcoholized “wine” taste like the varietal it came from have been fairly pathetic. The delivery system, the alcohol, once re-moved is not replaced by anything and thus the 1% of flavor components is rendered helpless, unable to contribute enough flavor to make the liquid a bare approximation of the original.
    Ah, but is it merely a delivery system? Is something else at play? I suspect so, and it gets back to Coleman Andrew’s essay in defense of the bliss-enhancing effects of alcohol and to some brilliantly crafted remarks by Hugh Johnson in his classic book Vintage in which he says that wine has the power to banish care.

This is not about inebriation. It is about relaxing the body, the brain, the psyche. Drink of a moderate sort frees the brain to create, to craft, to conjure, to leap to unknown islands of fantasy. Is there a coincidence that Irish playwrights, some of the greatest of all time, are notorious drinkers and many of them attribute their insights into humankind’s follies, foibles and fetishes by the freeing of the mind during an evening of consumption? Or a morning?
    I have read often of the pints (of beer), the rounds (of ale), the port and sherry, the Cognac and rum, that are but a prelude to some of the greatest words ever put to paper. In my own life, I occasionally find that I create essays such as this one with a more facile figurative tongue when typing away with a glass of very good wine at hand. Perhaps the fingers don’t work quite as smoothly, but the brain does.
    Mind you, I am fully aware of the amount of alcohol I am consuming. I drink wine with a great deal more knowledge than most people about what I am drinking and what effect it is having on me. (One headache was all I ever needed to teach me the point of saturation, after which even quad-strength Excedrin would be of no use.)
    Usually the wine I’m having is one for which I have a tech sheet that explains accurately its alcohol level. The wine I’m looking at during dinner-prep is often one I’m reviewing, perhaps one that was opened during a luncheon interview. Perhaps it was a new bottle, or simply one I wanted to gauge for a second time. Sometimes it’s a wine out of my cellar to see if it’s over the hill, or perhaps it’s just a wine I think will go well with the dish I’m cooking. Or perhaps it is one that simply aroused my curiosity.
    In no case was the fact of its alcohol a factor in my choice! That is, I do not choose a wine because it has a particular level of alcohol unless, of course, it is a wine chosen for its specifically low alcohol (such as a very low alcohol German Riesling on a searingly hot day).
    So, yes, I am aware of what I drink, down to the alcohol, and I am very sensitive about it when a wine maker sits across from me at a luncheon and alibis for her 14.8% alcohol Chardonnay that “it doesn’t taste that high, doesn’t come across that hot.” Maybe to her, but usually the heat in such a wine is obvious to me. It means I can drink a lot less of this wine than I would of one closer to 12.5%.
    Yes, I do want to feel that mild euphoria that I often feel after the second glass of wine with dinner. But I do not want alcohol intruding, shouting, “Hey, you, sitting there on the couch. Look at me. I got the goods. I’m big. I’m powerful. I’m a stud.” Crispness, freshness, vitality and a balanced level of alcohol are among the elements in a wine that grab my attention, not that brute who's trying to win me over with no subtlety at all.

   Yes, it’s possible for me to go beyond a comfortable level of consumption, but I have always done this at home with no further transportation plans other than ambulatory ones. I have on occasion found that a wine was so succulent, so rewarding, that I have reached that state where no further action was possible.
   Using a moderate-alcohol wine, I slowly hone down the frayed nerves of the day; the mild soporific effect shears off the rough edges of irritants remaining from the workday. Instead of fretting over yet-to-be-solved social or professional dilemmas, I relax. At these times, I often find I can do some tasks with a sense of casualness that makes them easier to handle. (And sometimes I am inert, preferring not to tackle anything more than a good book.)
   But note, if you will, the use of the term “moderate-alcohol wine”. I rarely use anything for care-removal that is high in alcohol. Not only does such a wine intrude on my reverie and obliterate vegetation, but there is less likelihood of fine-tuning the alcohol intake. I’d rather consume two glasses of a low-alcohol wine such as a Moscato than one of some high-alcohol Chardonnay.

Another Look at Alcohol
   Here we get to the second topic of the day, the high alcohol levels that were generally produced during the 1997 harvest in California [and more recently] and the problems California wine makers are having with this dilemma. And a major dilemma it is, not only for the fact that high alcohol makes a wine taste hot, harsh and delivers an awkward taste of what fruit is there, but also because high alcohol is generated by one of two situations, neither of which is optimum as far as wine flavor is concerned.
   The high alcohol in a wine is developed from:
(1) excessively long “hang time” where the grapes stayed on the vine an extra week or so. and during this period developed an over-ripe character in addition to higher sugar levels.
(2) white grapes having been picked at the proper time, crushed and then which sat around for a while on their skins, extracting higher sugars. The wait usually was caused by the winery trying to find tank space and human power to press them.
   The major reason for either one of these delay situations in 1997 was the size of the harvest. It was huge. The state of California’s Dept. of Food and Agriculture showed that California’s wine grape harvest was up 34% over 1996, an all-time record that exceeded the former record (in 1982) by 25%!
   “A lot of people planted a lot of grapevines, and not enough people planted tanks,” said one wine maker. Wineries throughout California’s north coast began harvesting grapes seven to ten days earlier than anticipated, and by then not all of the bottling of prior-year wines had been completed.
   On top of that, the early loads were far larger than expected. “Every time a grower told us he’d be bringing in 20 tons, he’d bring in 30!” said another wine maker. “We were still frantically trying to get things bottled, and not all of our bottles had arrived.”

More Ways to Get Higher Alcohol
   Back to the point of higher alcohols. They are generated by other things too, beyond higher-sugar grapes, such as:
(3) Closed-top fermenters for red wines. Historically, California wineries fermented red wines in open-top fermenters. These were easier to deal with for such techniques as pump-overs to extract tannins and to break up the cap of solids that forms during fermentation. However, some wineries have felt that such fermentations allowed valuable esters to escape into the air, so they converted to closed-top fermenters. Such tanks didn’t permit volatile alcohols to escape either, meaning that higher alcohol levels were likelier with open-top fermenters.
(4) More efficient yeasts. The use of yeast strains that are far more efficient in converting sugar to alcohol is a debatable subject, but many researchers have noted a trend toward higher conversion ratios lately, especially in grapes from cooler regions. The conversion factor of sugar to alcohol listed in 30 year old wine books was 0.55 (meaning that grapes containing 24% sugar, or 24 brix as the wine professionals say, would yield a wine that is 0.55 x 24 or 13.2% alcohol. By 1986, wineries were seeing 0.60 conversions. Recently I have heard of conversion rations of 0.62! Those same 24 brix grapes could today easily yield a wine that is 14.9% alcohol (0.62 x 24)!
   It would seem that some or all of these alcohol enhancing factors converged with the 1997 harvest. We are thus seeing wines with some of the highest alcohol contents ever. This is very worrisome.

A Possible Solution
   Various solutions to the high alcohol problems have been around for years. The most notor-ious is to simply dilute the wine with water - perfectly legal and commonly used with some of the cheaper jug wines - Chablis anyone? A second method is reverse osmosis, which has been used to make some of those “non-alcoholic wines” discussed earlier (See part 1).
   About a decade ago an Australian invention called the Spinning Cone came to the US. Using a vacuum distillation process, the cone is expensive (about $300,000 each). Sutter Home, Delicato and Associated Vintage Group each have one of these machines and they are reportedly operating night and day these days as wineries bring in fractions of their wines to drop alcohols down to zero. Then those fractions are blended back into an existing higher-alcohol lot of wine, reducing the overall alcohol in the final product.
   The idea is to take, for example, a 15.1% alcohol Zinfandel, de-alcoholize a portion of it, then blend back the the original lot to drop the alcohol to, say, 13.9% of the entire wine. This is beneficial to taste and aroma, but also because wines over 14.0% pay a higher federal tax, and in many cases the cost of de-alcoholizing a wine is completely offset by paying a lower tax on the resulting wine.
   Clark Smith of Vinovations, which offers reverse osmosis alcohol reductions to wineries, says wine makers have to brush up on their chemistry before removing alcohols. “We’re really plowing new ground here, making wines we’ve never made before. You have to be there when you do it. You can’t order it over the phone like a pizza. Every tenth of a point can be a major difference.”
   Smith began working with Carol Shelton at Windsor Vineyards on strategies designed to improve the quality of certain wines by lowering their alcohol levels. This requires a tricky process of trial and error based on sensory evaluation more than formulation.

   Clark Smith, of Vinovations, said a classic example of not understanding the process occurred recently. “A guy came in with a Chardonnay that was 14.8% alcohol and he wanted 13.9.” Smith asked what the alcohol was in the producer’s Chardonnay the previous year - a factor he wants to understand before “dialing in” an alcohol level.
   After a certain alcohol reduction, Smith and the wine maker began doing various blends. “When we hit the 13.9% he wanted, the wine was not very good; it was hot. At around 13.75% it was tasting about right, but we kept on [trial] blending, down to 13.6%, 13.5%, and these wines were not very good, sort of disharmonious.”

   Smith then started to develop a theory, using many of the wines Carol Shelton of Windsor Vineyards made and experimented with. He called the optimum final alcohol level “the sweet spot” - the place at which a wine yields the maximum fruit and varietal character without alcohol interference. Smith theorizes that there may be more than one “sweet spot” in each wine. In the case of the Chardonnay producer, he said, one level was reached at 13.75% and another at 13.4%, “and at that level we had an understated, classy style of Chardonnay. And so we keep on going, and we get to 12.9% and there is a Grand Cru Chablis! It’s more flinty, and it’s all there in the original wine, but it was masked by the alcohol! We all thought that was the best wine.” For commercial reasons, the wine maker chose to make the wine at 13.75% alcohol.
   In some wines, alcohol levels can be brought down significantly. In some Sauvignon Blancs, wines above 14% may have to come down to 12.3% to reach that “sweet spot.” Smith said Shelton had a Zinfandel with 15.0% natural alcohol that, when brought down to the high 13’s, was a far more approachable and drinkable wine.
   Shelton: “In most cases, [higher] alcohol masks flavors.” He suggested a test: “Get 100 proof Smirnoff and toss in 2% in a Chardonnay or Zinfandel and look what happens to the bitterness and the astringency (Note - this would change a 13% wine into a 13.7% wine. Of course, it would also reduce the flavor and acidity slightly.). Do it with Grand Cru Chablis and see the aromas disappear. Now take a wine and put 2% water in it, and try to account for the fact that the wine falls apart (Note - this would change a 13% wine into a 12.75% wine).”
   Smith says that wine makers now have a new tool in making wine. “When these guys come out of the lab, they're giggling. They have all this power they never had before.” This alcohol reduction and back-blending technique “uncouples the harvest decision from the brix at which you pick. Now you can pick your grapes when you have the ripe flavor and not worry about the alcohol masking the flavor.”

   I spoke with Carol Shelton at Windsor about her work with Smith. She has bottled and aged a number of Zinfandels with differing alcohols, which is the only difference between them. These are the exact same wine that differ only in that they are one-tenth of a point apart, from 14.5% to 13.5%. The wines over 14% do not age well. They tend to get pruney.
   “As you bring the alcohol down toward the sweet point,” she said, “you see the wine more clearly, but if you get too low [in alcohol], you lose some of the focus and the sweetness of the fruit, and it actually loses varietal definition.” She believes there is about a two-tenths of 1 percent window for the optimum point and there may, as Smith suggests, be more than one sweet point, Varietals probably differ in their sweet spots (Zinfandels, on average, probably have their sweet spots at higher levels than, say Cabernets).
   Can you “dial in the the style” of wine based on alcohol content? I asked. “I have done that,” she said. “I have two Zinfandels, one I left at 15% alcohol because it couldn’t handle the de-alcoholizing. And the other one is under 14% and it is a completely different wine. And I have a third Zinfandel, a Sonoma County wine that is a nice quaffing wine with a lower price, and it was de-alcoholized. The original blend was 14.5% and we got it down to 13.7% and it was a better wine.”

   Another conclusion Shelton has drawn: Zinfandel and Chardonnay are the grapes in which de-alcoholization seems to have more validity.
   As to higher alcoholic conversions from certain yeasts, she said she was concerned about this and that two yeasts she has been using for red wines lately, called BM45 and D254, from Scott Labs, not only yield a slightly lower alcohol, but also lower the taster’s perception of acidity. She said the D254 yeast appears to produce polysaccharides (or pentoses) that coat the tongue. “The wine doesn’t seem quite as edgy.”
   Shelton pointed out that de-alcoholizing techniques, careful back-blending and the use of less efficient yeasts are all relatively new techniques that permit a degree of flexibility in harvest dates. This leads to the obvious question: If we are now going to pick grapes based solely on flavor (generally a very good idea), will this eventually take the intuition, the historical perspective, out of the picking decision. Will, in fact, this lead to a situation where the technology has the effect of lulling wine makers into a false sense of security?
   I’m not prepared to argue one way or the other, but Shelton believes that the alcohol- reduction capabilities we now have are an significant evolutionary step in wine making, an incremental move forward that forces wine makers to factor new ideas into their thinking. (Joel’s note: These techniques are relevant to California winemaking with its extensive sun-shine and warm weather, but much less relevant to winemaking in Europe, where high alcohol levels are the exception rather than the rule.)
   “When you are raising the skill level, you have to start slowly,” said Clark Smith. “You have to make experimental lots. You have to pick some fruit at different brix and see what results. The school is in the vineyard and the answer is probably very site-specific.”
   As with me and my appreciation for the moderate alcohols in the wines that give me the most pleasure, the answer to great wine lies partially in harmonies that expand a wine’s horizons, not a structure that narrows it and allows for appreciation only by those who can tolerate exaggeration and exotic elements.
   And as with my fascination in how alcohol can rasp off the daily roughness and the frazzles of life: moderate alcohol in fine wine helps to tame even oddly designed foods and serves to bring calmness to a place where vexation once resided.

Dan Berger publishes a weekly wine commentary, Vintage Experiences, via fax or U.S. mail. For a copy, call 310-455-9463, e-mail at info@vintageexperiences.com or write to 415 South Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga CA 90290

E-Mail: beekman@conversent.net

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