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The Sugar and Alcohol Problem
It seems painfully obvious to say that alcohol is one of the major pillars that hold up the edifice that we know as “wine” – it is an integral part of the drink’s flavor, and frankly, the substance’s presence is one of reasons that we enjoy wine as much as we do. In fact, without alcohol there is no wine at all. But in recent years (beginning let’s say 25 years ago or so) alcohol levels in many wines began to slowly but inexorably climb, especially in New World wines. The obvious question is “why”?
Well, a good portion of this phenomenon is the by-product of a different objective – the pursuit of richer, riper, and frankly, sweeter wines. Let’s face it, sweeter is easier. If you want greater appreciation of your food/drink product, the most direct way to achieve that aim is to simply add sugar. It’s a lowest common denominator flavor. There are various ways of achieving this end, from longer hang times on the vine to promote the building of greater natural sugar levels, to just directly dumping 50 pound bags of granulated cane sugar into “finished” lots of wine. More sugar allows the more powerful modern selected yeast strains to produce more alcohol. And alcohol in itself also makes a wine appear rounder and softer, which aids wines that already have notable quantities of residual sugar to appear that much more “generous”.
So what’s the problem with sweeter/more alcoholic wines? Shouldn’t the consumer be allowed to choose what kind of wine he or she likes to drink? The answer to that is a resounding yes, but with a couple of HUGE qualifiers - as long as the consumer is well educated, and is also exposed to REAL diversity and choice. But all too often, these criteria are not met, and the consumer is left to fend for him- or herself, frequently at the mercy of those who seek to make wine just another beverage like a soda or the latest blue-colored alcoholic concoction.
But let’s face the facts; wine is indeed an esoteric pursuit. No one is born with a deep understanding of wine, and wine does not exist outside of the culture from which it springs. But often the skeptics will level the “snob” or “elitist” epithet at those who seek to seat wine within a context, using the “if you like it, it’s good” argument. And to some degree this is all true, but what is even truer is the more you understand in your head, and the more you challenge your palate, the more styles you will be able to appreciate, and eventually understand why these “strong sweeties” are nothing more than a current fashion, not a legitimate, tried and true style. What they are are dumbed-down dry wines.
Further, what many of these sweet and strong wines do is ignore any connection to a region, or a cuisine, or a tradition. In fact, producers of these kinds of wines essentially seek to explicitly SEPARATE wine from place and tradition, replacing a process of centuries of natural selection with flavor focus groups and marketing strategy sessions designed simply to sell more wine. And guess what? - their crosshairs are fixed firmly on your palate, and if you’re anything like me, that ought to make you pretty uncomfortable. Essentially mine is an anti-homogenization, pro-biodiversity, “use it or lose it” argument. Think about it this way: if every producer were to go out and hire a consultant to find out what the “average” drinker wants, wouldn’t we presumably end up with hundreds of similar wines designed for the least common denominator wine drinker? Or have we already arrived at this point?
So rather than trying to work with what nature gives a producer, many actively try to fight terroir to produce what they think the “people” want. That approach not only assumes that you are just like everyone else, it also, over time, begins to contort your palate, as you have more and more engineered wines foisted upon you. For the more “bottom line” oriented folks among us, let me enumerate some truly PRACTICAL reasons why these “strong sweeties” are not what you want to be drinking:
- If you have any interest in serving wine with food (and it is at this nexus that wine comes to full fruition), these wines are the less compatible. Lighter, higher acidity wines combine with food flavors and cleanse the palate much more felicitously.
- These “strong and sweet” wines are much more punishing to the palate. Do a little experiment. Pick up a bottle of Australian Shiraz or Grenache and youthfully-styled Rosso di Montalcino or Salice Salentino from Italy, and few friends. Open both bottles, and see which one gets finished first. Also, if you like to drink wine, you’ll almost surely want to have that extra glass. Wines with 15% alcohol and a good bit of residual sugar strongly discourage this.
- “Strong sweeties” are almost always more expensive than more terroir-driven wines, and if they’re not, they’re almost surely poorer values than their more honest competitors.
- Lighter, more balanced wines are easier on your health as well. We all have enough sugar in our diets and a wine with 12.5% alcohol makes controlling alcohol intake much easier than a wine with 15.5%.
- Diversity. “Place-driven” wines are simply more likely to give the drinker unique flavors. There is a great price to be paid – a great loss – when the goal is always massive, inky wines.
One final point. Please don’t be confused about the nature of terroir. There are indeed some places that naturally want to produce these massively-styled wines (places like Priorat in Spain and Lodi in California come to mind), but even in these places, one still fundamentally has to want to push the natural envelope to achieve these over-the-top ripe styles. For those of you old enough to remember, or lucky enough to have access to old bottles of Inglenook or old Beringer Cabernets, check the alcohol levels, and compare them with the identical wines of today. The 60s and 70s bottlings are almost with exception 12%, 12.5%, and possibly even 13% alcohol. The wines of today RARELY dip below 13.5%, and most exceed 14% or even 15%! And yes, we are experiencing some global warming, but nothing in nature has gone far enough to make that marked a difference.
When all is said and done, you will always drink what you like, but I believe that the more you explore the subtleties of restrained, place-driven wines (especially with food), the clearer it will become that the highly extracted, massive, alcoholic wines have more to do with the emperor’s new clothes than your enjoyment and edification.
TOM CIOCCO
