A plea: When selling online, please list ABV

[Guillermo_M]

Edited original post to acknowledge that Wine.com (sometimes) and GrandVin both list ABV.

Since I just noticed that those two merchants do have it, I want to underscore how important it can be (and stress again that sometimes the data is not easy to look up which is why I bring it up). Let me use one example of ABV of the same wine through the last few vintages:

Pichon Comtesse de Lalande:
2014 ABV - WDC doesn’t say but 13.2% according to Jeff Leve’s website (WA doesn’t say)
2015 ABV - 13.5% according to WDC but 13.6% according to Jeff Leve’s website (WA doesn’t say)
2016 ABV - 13.5% according to WDC but 13.32% according to Jeff Leve’s website (Neal Martin when he was at WA said the same as Jeff)
2017 ABV - WDC doesn’t say for this one but 13.1% according to Jeff Leve’s website (Lisa Perrotti-Brown doesn’t say at WA)
2018 ABV - 14.5% according to GrandVin and WDC but “just” 14% according to Jeff Leve’s website and to Lisa Perrotti-Brown (WA)
2019 ABV - 14.2% according to GrandVin (maybe rounded up from the 14.15% according to Lisa Perrotti-Brown (WA) but 14.1% according to Jeff Leve’s website)
2020 ABV - 13.6% according to WDC and the same according to Jeff Leve’s website, but Lisa is back to mum on ABV


I bolded 2018 and 2019 for two reasons. First, in both years, people accustomed to buying a ~13.5% wine should really be warned that the incoming one is up to a full point higher. Second, the difference in the 2018 between what GrandVin and WDC are saying and what Jeff is saying (0.5%) is significant.

I realize that Jeff usually enters that data in his first tasting at the Chateau, not from the bottle and I imagine there could be variation once bottled (though half a percentage point seems like a lot).

Alcohol levels can vary between barrel samples to finished bottles. This happens for a myriad of reasons, more exact measurements from the time the initial samples were measured, to importers, or estates rounding things off for tax reasons, being in a hurry to print the information and typos, etc.

Personally, I am more concerned about balance than wine by the numbers. The descriptor tells you a lot more about the wine IMO. Today, Pichon Lalande is making the best wines in the history of the estate. Try a bottle is my suggestion before making a buying decision based on ABV #. My notes hopefully tell you what you need to know, at least I hope so.

Trust me Jeff, your notes on 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Pichon Lalande are top of mind for me. And I realize there can be variation in ABV from the sample as I said in my last paragraph. That’s why I want retailers to give the number on the bottle.

I’m going to go slightly off topic since I have you here.

Back to your notes, they’re the ones that make me want to buy some for aging. And yes they’re very, very helpful and I thank you for them. That said, I also know that your palate tends to run relatively more modern and so, if I want more classic, I need to keep that in mind.

Going on your non-technical notes alone, I’d say the 2019 sounds best to me. But unlike what you did for the 2018 notes, your 2019 notes don’t make a direct stylistic comparison to 2018 or 2016, so I only have scores, technical notes, and my parsing of your poetry to go on.

You score as follows:
2016 (100 pts)
2018 (99 pts)
2019 (98-100 points)
2020 (97-99 points)

Then you also provide pH (THANK YOU!): 2016 (3.76 pH) — (mid 13% ABV)
2018 (3.85 pH) — (mid 14% ABV) (these are Napa numbers in my mind)
2019 (3.70 pH) — (in the lows of 14% ABV)
2020 (3.82 pH) — (mid 13% ABV)

pH is a logarithmic scale. The difference in acidity between 2018 and 2019 is significant. In fact, at least one study I saw says that above 3.8 pH wine has too little protective acid to age well and that keeping it at 3.7 or lower is best (of course phenolics matter to but you need the alcohol something to esterify with as I understand it). And as far as balance is concerned, the fact that 2019 is more acid than 2016 but has the higher alcohol would imply to me that it is better balanced than that 2018. (An extra confounding point is that the 2016 and 2020 varietal mixes are a bit more similar to each other than to the almost identical 2018 and 2019).

So, which to go long on if I’d be buying either 2019 or 2020 en primeur? I can’t try them first. So there’s some trust in your notes that always goes into it. I’m not in the same income level as some people here so I need to be judicious (not that most people would regard $200 for a bottle of wine as judicious, let alone buying several to age, but here we are).

I still think 2019 before prices skyrocket. But not sure. Any thoughts?