Can you tell? With all the discussion on the high alcohol aging thread, I am curious.
No.
You could hazard a guess, if you had an accurate alcohol number (which you usually don’t) - if it tasted like a wine made from very ripe grapes yet the alcohol was less high than would correspond, I guess watering back would be more likely.
Really, what matters is in the glass. You like it or you don’t. There isn’t anything about adding water per se that should concern you. If it tends to be for more ripe wines, you can like those or not, but watering back itself shouldn’t matter.
It’s funny, I would guess many non-geeks just assume water is added to the making of wine. Wouldn’t you?
^ What he said ^
I’d rather have the brix too high and have to water back to adjust than have a wine that is under-ripe and insipid. Of course you’ll get a different response from France where they can legally add sugar. They can pick under-ripe and adjust up. We can’t.
Well . . .we can’t legally ‘add sugar’ but that doesn’t stop folks from adding ‘grape concentrate’ - at 60-70 brix!!!
But the sugar only adds alcohol, not flavor, so your “pick under-ripe” comment really makes no sense.
Does it? Since they have a hard time getting grapes ripe in France many years due to the weather they have no choice but to pick under-ripe, or should I say far less ripe than California?
Brian, have you ever tried a Metras Beaujolais? One of the most intensely ripe wines that crosses my lips, yet the alcohol is often sub-12 (at least per the label).
They have a hard time getting grapes ripe in France? Do you think this is still the 1960s with bad vineyard practice and cooler temps?
What a joke!
Having watered back, added sugar (shhh…) and tried adding concentrate (not a fan), from my experience and in my opinion, there’s a point where watering back and adding sugar can be done without really showing negatively in the wine. There’s also a line which, once crossed, the manipulation stands out. For my taste that point was around a 10% addition. So taking grapes at 20 and chaptalizing them to 22 is doable with, hopefully, only the desired positive effect on the wine. Same goes for 27 brix and going back to around 24.3.
Don’t know if that helps or not.
Adam Lee
Telltale Signs of Watering Back?
A ripeness to acid ratio that seems suspicious. Generally when grapes are picked very ripe they have high sugar and low acid. When you water back to lower the resulting alcohol you lower the acid ratio even more through dilution so more acid needs to be added.
The point of chaptalizing isn’t necessarily to raise alcohol. Sometimes it’s employed to extend fermentations, particularly in cool cellars, to increase extraction. In those cases, it does add more than alcohol.
I thought there were estimates that more than half of higher quality wines in California were watered back. Am I misremembering that? Is that true? If so, it would be hard to know what a benchmark was.
Does anyone but Ridge disclose it?
But it’s not going to take the flavors of “unripe” grapes (Brian’s assertion) and make good wine. That was my point, if unelegantly stated.
John,
I’ve often wondered about people who mention extending fermentation. When measuring fermentation with an Anton-Parr I see that sugars generally decrease by 2ish points per day and that’s in the coolest ferment. I don’t know of anyone that chaptalizes more than that, so are we talking about a day more of fermentation at the max? What are you achieving from that, that couldn’t be achieved by just leaving it on the skins another day post ferment? Just wondering if you’ve heard…
Adam Lee
Adam - thanks for specific, real-world scenarios. Great context.
Berry,
Generally, the way I’ve done it is to bleed off the appropriate amount of juice first, then add the water back (with the water adjusted to the same pH as the juice). That way you are just replacing the juice removed with water.
Adam Lee
I have always felt that ripeness was related to flavor more than sugar. Cool climate fruit can reach physiological maturity with lower sugar accumulations and warm climate fruit reaches flavor ripeness at higher Brix.
So perhaps rather than calling France under ripe or California over ripe, just saying higher and lower Brix fruit works? It’s a drier way of saying it(no pun intended) but less likely to include an unwarranted judgement on the wine.
Also, I hope things are recovering in California and am glad to see you guys posting.
Here is a telltale sign from the 2015 Ridge Lytton Springs label:
Ingredients: Hand harvested grapes; indigenous
yeast; naturally occurring malolactic bacteria;
0.6% water addition; tartaric acid; oak from
barrel aging; minimum effective SO2
. JO (11/16)
I only know this second/third/fourth hand from reading, so I can’t say to what degree chaptalization extends fermentation.
Jasper Morris, in his encyclopedic “Inside Burgundy,” suggests that few top producers chaptalize these days. But he says, “Some producers do see an advantage in adding a small amount of sugar – maybe 0.3 per cent alcohol, towards the end of the fermentation – just to spin the fermentation out a little further and gain extra complexity.”
Great thread. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed watering back in a younger wine, but as mentioned above, there seems to be a point at which water and/or acid additions seem to throw balance off-kilter as a wine ages. I suppose that could happen in younger wines, too, but I haven’t really noticed it.