Where do you stand on the debate over alcohol content in wine?

[MiraNapa]

Each winemaker seeks a certain sugar level and flavor combination before deciding to harvest. Each decision is made based on a set of unique characteristics consistent with their winery’s methods. This is the first step in a process to determine the eventual alcohol content. Some argue for a higher content — conventionally thought of as 14 percent or higher — some argue for a lower.

What do you think? Read the op-ed from Gustavo Gonzalez, Mira Winemaker, and let us know in the comments below.

 

[joeswine]

abv.............level

I like my wines to have a robust taste and a abv. of or around 12/14%,that creates a good balance between oak ,tannins and sugars if any in BIG REDS, and not to high in more suttle reds like SHARAZ. WHITE wines 12% is just nice.that's how I see it any way.

 

[vacuumpumpman]

I will typically shoot for 12 - 14% unless it is port then it would be between 18 -22 %

 

[DoctorCAD]

I've been in the "alcohol to taste" camp since I started making wine, heck, I even thought about it before I started making wine.

Ig 10% makes the wine taste great, why not leave it there. If 15% works, fine. To arbitrarally "add sugar to 1.105 just because" really doesn't make good sense to the product. Cheap vodka will get you drunk, wine is to enjoy.

 

[acorn]

In my view, high alcohol can ruin a perfectly good wine, more so than too little can taste insufficient. I therefore prefer to go easy on it, unless I know what to expect. When making country wines, like cranberry, for instance, I had it ferment to about 10% alcohol with some residual sugar left (S.G. 1.000), which made it a pleasant, fresh, and aromatic wine. On the other hand, when I made a batch of raspberry with 13.5% alcohol, it would just about throw it off balance and ruin it, had it been anywhere around 14% or higher. On the other hand I cannot imagine what my Merlot would taste if it had only 10% alcohol, but most likley too "uninteresting", to say the least. So, while lot depends on personal preferences, I consider light wines with 10%-12% alcohol perfectly fine, while darker and richer wines need 14%-16% to balance its' other characteristics.

 

[Charlesthewino]

I'd say this is totally dependent upon what type of wine you are making. I prefer an ABV of 12-14% most of the time. However, I make mostly fruit wines and some fruit juice flavor will be totally overcome by the high ABV. Pear and apple, for example, I prefer around 6% ABV as they typically produce a very light flavor. Most grape juice you can have a very enjoyable wine at 13%. For me the flavor and aroma is more important than the kick.

 

[Turock]

10% is fine for wines that won't be in the racks very long. 12-14% is good for wines that will be aged long term.

 

[Bergmann]

I am a fruit wine enjoyer, I like a wine that has the flavor of the chosen fruit. I find that for my taste anything between 10 and 14% seems to work a nice combination. I am not drinking wine for the alcohol, more for the flavor. I got aviation fuel in the hanger if I need a kick. LOL

 

[jswordy]

Anything over 10% is fine. 10% is crucial for preservation. You can adjust alcohol to whatever you want on the back end by blending.

Back in the literature, alcohol content of wines since the 1950s has been largely a matter of marketing and the styles of the times, just as sugar content/dryness has varied over time. In the '50s through '70s, if you marketed a dry wine you ensured low sales.

But wineries become popularly successful by offering something distinctive, which then gets adopted by others who notice the success, and a trend emerges. Likewise, if a few major influencers can be swayed, the public gets "educated" more quickly and the trend develops even faster. This is particularly true with wines. Still, industry marketing surveys overwhelmingly indicate that people buy wines based on the label design more than any other factor.

Sweet/dry sales can be used as a rough historical indicator of alcohol content in commercial wines, since it did not have to be reported "back in the day." The sweetness pendulum has swung pretty regularly back and forth at a more rapid clip in recent years, whereas prior to the late 1980s most commercial wines were sweet. The market is now bifurcating, which is good because it means a wider spectrum of consumer choices.

IIRC, most wines sold in the U.S. in recent times are sweet and lower ABV, but there have been important inroads made by dry and ultra-dry wines with much higher ABV and that share of the market had been expanding faster than the sweet wines in recent times. However, starting in about 2011, a trend back to lower alcohol, sweeter commercial wines began anew.

 

[LeChat]

Sweet/dry sales can be used as a rough historical indicator of alcohol content in commercial wines, since it did not have to be reported "back in the day." The sweetness pendulum has swung pretty regularly back and forth at a more rapid clip in recent years, whereas prior to the late 1980s most commercial wines were sweet. The market is now bifurcating, which is good because it means a wider spectrum of consumer choices.

Hey Jim,

Not too sure that I agree with the fact that Sweet/Dry wine is a proxy for alcohol content. It is certainly possible to get a sweet highly alcoholic wine (i.e. port style, dessert) or a dry lowly alcoholic wine (dry brut, beaujolais).

I don't particularly care for the alcohol content except that it matches the taste profile. I don't want to drink rocket fuel or diluted water.

I also think that focusing on wine alcohol content only is a bit of a snobbery act. I don't care that a wine I am drinking is outside of the alcoholic range that a snooty sommelier is saying the wine should be. As long as it tastes good and achieves balance.

Yes, I am a bit of an heretic....::

 

[jswordy]

Hey Jim,

Not too sure that I agree with the fact that Sweet/Dry wine is a proxy for alcohol content. It is certainly possible to get a sweet highly alcoholic wine (i.e. port style, dessert) or a dry lowly alcoholic wine (dry brut, beaujolais).

I don't particularly care for the alcohol content except that it matches the taste profile. I don't want to drink rocket fuel or diluted water.

I also think that focusing on wine alcohol content only is a bit of a snobbery act. I don't care that a wine I am drinking is outside of the alcoholic range that a snooty sommelier is saying the wine should be. As long as it tastes good and achieves balance.

Yes, I am a bit of an heretic....::

Agree or not, sweet/dry must be a proxy for alcohol content in the historical sense, since it was largely not divulged in the 1940s, 1950s or 1960s, the period of rapid growth of the commercial wine industry in the U.S.

I've got a small library now of old commercial winemaking books from those days, and the American commercial processes used then were very different from today and did produce sweet or dry wines strictly according to the length of ferment (i.e., percentage of alcohol). I am talking here of wine, not a fortified product.

All the chemicals in use now to control yeast were not available then, and UC-Davis' fabulous research and industry improvement efforts had not begun or, in the case of the 1960s, were in their infancy. UC-Davis' work started out with basic yeast testing basically just to find out what yeast could do, since the wineries were simply naturally fermenting then with whatever wild strains they had managed to inoculate their cops and equipment with through use. The other leg of UC-Davis' early push was simple basic sanitation, also not a No. 1 priority at early wineries.

As an example of how different the accepted practices were, up until 1982 wines were routinely filtered through a mat of asbestos. So if you are old enough to have drank commercial wine back then, you drank some asbestos particles. Same if you have been saving that 1981 Whatever in your cellar. You will very likely drink some asbestos.

So to assess alcohol content, you pretty much have to infer from sweet or dry if you go back farther than the late 60s. BTW, even though the pendulum does swing back and forth on sweet/dry and high/lower ABV, historically Americans have preferred a sweet, lower alcohol wine of about 10-12% ABV. This makes Europeans and connoisseur types aghast.