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Monday, January 4, 2010
Are you a fan of high-alcohol wines?
I found this story from insidebayarea.com entitled “California wines get alcohol boost” pretty intriguing. It dovetails with what some winemakers confided in recent visits to the Santa Barbara and Paso Robles winemaking regions of California, both of which have climates that allow winemakers and vineyard owners a lot of leeway as to how ripe they want their grapes to be at harvest. Many of them know their showy, high-extract, high-alcohol pinot noirs and syrahs and zinfandels won’t age well.
Here’s the portion of the insidebayarea.com story that caught my eye:
Grapes picked early require more time in the bottle, so they develop flavor and soften their acids and tannins. In contrast, the high-octane wines don’t improve with age, winemakers said. Instead, they can deteriorate — because acidity helps preserve wines, the low acid-high sugar wines may start to taste flat or “flabby” over time.
“They just fall apart,” said Jerold O’Brien of Silver Mountain Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, who said small, local growers favor lower-alcohol wines.
And because the super-ripe grapes tend to taste alike, there is a loss of distinction based on region, or terroir, Dunn said.
That’s Dunn as in Randy Dunn, who makes legendary cabernets from Howell Mountain grapes.
I suspect the backlash over high-alcohol wines has already begun, and consumer tastes are shifting slowly away from the monsters, much in the same way as consumers rebelled against overly oaky chardonnays and other wood-dominated wines.
A return to something resembling middle ground would be welcome.
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