Past Articles - 2002
Sydney Time
Copyright © Ric Einstein 2008
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It was only about a decade ago that most
Australian red wines came in at about 13 percent alcohol and even the
big wines that were choco full of flavour like Grange were seldom much over 13
percent. In the last decade, there has been an ever-increasing trend
for wines to become higher in alcohol. The reason given is that the higher alcohol wines provide a riper richer flavour
and to some extent, that’s true but now we are seeing many wines up around 15
percent and in some cases even 16 percent. To put that in perspective, port and
other fortified wines are around 18 percent and they have brandy spirit added. If we step back a decade or more, many of our wines were
green and unripe, so the need for riper wines is not in dispute. If higher
alcohol wines were the total fix, then that would be great, but unfortunately that’s not always the case. Recently I have tasted many wines from warm climate areas
that were vintaged in 2000. There have also been a number of wines from cooler
climates from better vintages like 1998 and 1999 and many of these wines have
been 14 to 15 percent alcohol and in some cases, close
to 16%. The problem is, that many of them are still green and show unripe
characteristics. So, why is that so? Well,
I am not a viticulturist by any stretch of the imagination but to put it in
simple terms, there is a difference between actual ripeness and psychological
ripeness. In other words, the grapes can
have the right sugar level to appear rip but not have the necessary components to ensure the desired
flavour complexities are in the grapes. If
these grapes are picked and made into wine, the result
is high alcohol wines lacking in complexity that taste green and boring. There is a real juggling act
required by the growers, pick to early and the grapes
may not be ripe, pick to late and they may be ruined. It’s not an easy task to
get it right in a difficult year and even harder in cool climate areas. High alcohol is in and of itself not a solution to the green unripe
flavours found in some wines and whilst we
have come along way in reducing the level of unripe green wine sold, we still
have a way to go. There are plusses and minuses in high alcohol wines. If done properly, they can and do frequently get rid of the
unripe flavours, but there are potential
downsides. We don’t have a big track record
and history of how these big wines will age. There are some examples like the
91 Bullers Calliope The 1983 Grange is
one of the best wines that I have ever drunk, it’s loaded with flavour and guess what? Its only 12.9 percent! So how did they manage to
produce a wine like this and what’s the future hold? Read next weeks Journal
and find out. Cheers Ric © To quickly recap, the 1983 Grange
is full of flavour, rich and ripe and only has 12.9% alcohol yet many of
the 2000 wines I have tried at 15 or even 16% alcohol
are green and unripe, so how did wineries produce such great wines in
past decades with lower alcohol. Things were very different now then in previous decades. Firstly, crop yields in many cases were a lot lower than
they are today. Obviously the more fruit you produce per acre
potentially the more money that can be made, but
lower cropping levels generally produce better fruit. If you go to
extremes, you can produce eight tonnes per acre, but the fruit you produce
would almost be fit for cask wine and not much else, so at that level
when the grower goes to sell the grapes, they are not going to be paid much
less per tonne, so overcropping is not a smart idea. Yields are up but you
can’t produce great wine or get much for your grapes when you sell them. So the challenge for growers was how do they produce
more grapes per acre and still maintain quality? The answer came in the form of irrigation. Previously many
quality vineyards were “dry grown” and irrigation was not used. As a result,
you had less grapes per hectare, but the quality was potentially better. In
some cases, believe it or not, the grapes were picked very ripe (15%) and some
H2O
mysteriously made it’s way into the wine to reduce the alcohol. In drought
years like 1983, the yield per acre would have been very low, but the grapes
that survived were good and had great flavour concentration. And this is where irrigation comes in because it has many
benefits. Increased yields, the ability to better control factors in the
vineyard, reduce stress, reduce the incidence of crops from being lost due to
drought etc. However there is a down side. Irrigation
changes the flavour profile in the picked grape. (In some cases this
can be a positive but in some cases it’s negative.) On many of the “better quality” wine labels you will see “dry grown from old
vines” and there is no coincidence that these wines are normally good
quality. But what of “old vines” and what constitutes “old vines” anyway? The “old vines” term is one that’s thrown around very
loosely, almost as loosely as the line, “the grapes from this vineyard have
been used in Grange” (smile.) Frankly, I don’t know what constitutes “old
vines”; there is no formal definition of “old vines”
and in many cases is just a marketing ploy. Just because grapes are grown on
“old vines” doesn’t mean that they will be good, but grapes that are “dry
grown” – if they are truly old, may, just may,
contain great fruit. It’s very hard to produce great wine from young irrigated
vines, but it does happen, but not all that often. So given a choice of grapes
from genuine old vines that are dry grown and young irrigated vines, I would
take the old dry grown grapes in most cases. So to get back to my original
point, a lot of the green and unripe 2000 wines that I have been trying that
are 15 percent alcohol are coming from irrigated young vines. It will be very interesting to see how the percentage of
alcohol shifts over the next few years, but I am willing to predict that it
will be reduced in some cases and will stabilise in many others. High alcohol
is not the only solution required to eliminate green unripe wine. Cheers Ric © Copyright © Ric Einstein 2003 |