Makes sense, especially since they are unfermented, but once fully consumed by yeast fundamentally I would assume all of the ethanol is chemically identical and if not, I am guessing the quantity would be almost imperceptible, like adding 1% Malbec to a 99% Cabernet blend.
The things that make the sugars taste different aren’t the sugars themselves, which are both mostly sucrose, but the impurities in them. The fermentation process will modify some of these components, which could enhance, suppress, or not significantly effect those differences. I would not expect additions of, say, 0.2%, to have a significant flavor impact coming from these sugar impurities (hell, most people can’t even tell the difference between the actual sweetness of a 0.2% sugar difference), but percentage-level differences could.
We have a spirits customer who did that for us, many Italian spirits use beet sugar but he is sure that cane is better. (This is as a sweetening agent, of course, not to be fermented.)
All the comments in the thread about how you can’t taste chaptalization are confusing me.
If you mean “a taster can’t reliably tell that one Burg versus others was chaptalized,” then I get that.
But it doesn’t make sense that it has no effect on the taste, body or smell of the wine. If it doesn’t, why does anyone do it?
Do the comments mean the first thing?
If done properly it should be utterly unnoticeable. How would you know what the starting point was? When I worked harvest in Burgundy in 2011 I saw famous domaines chapitalizing fermenters. For all the faults of 2011 not sure I’ve heard, “and I could taste all the sugar they added.” I get that anything can be poorly done and therefore noticeable but to have it be that much of a proverbial eyesore is remarkable and would have to be a massive outlier.
A favorite story someone told on the old Parker forum forever ago: the industry person posting had happened upon a tour at some prestigious north coast winery and been invited to join. At the end of the tour the winemaker was standing on top of a pallet of bags of sugar fielding questions. The poster asked “Do you ever chaptalize your wine?” “No. Never.”
Indeed this.
But I guess the original question was that if there are any noticeable flavors or aromatics one can pick up from a chaptalized wine - and the answer is pretty much no.
However, one can “taste” in the sense of detect tactile qualities (more body, more richness in the texture, more warmth from the alcohol) - or, at most, taste more the presence of alcohol, either as pure alcohol, or as that subtle sense of sweetness that is inherent to alcohol - in a chaptalized wine. However, as Jim here put it, you’d have to compare it to the unchaptalized version to really be able to taste the difference.
The winemaker at one of the more famous Domaines told us effectively the same thing on a recent visit - unless we can tell the wine has been chaptalized, it’s just another tool they use to make balanced wine.
It’s like farming - producers make farming choices to make the wines better, but that doesn’t mean I can taste higher canopies. ![]()
Yes, I am convinced it makes a difference.
Back in the mid 19th century, Guyot did an experiment whereby he fermented all the various sorts of sugars people could use for augmenting a wine’s alcoholic degree (even including honey IIRC), and then distilled the resulting alcohol. The only resulting distillate that tasted better than distilled wine was the distillate from fermented cane sugar.
Anecdotal, but I agree with the superiority of cane sugar. For liquer de tirage we’re 100% cane sugar.
Same for chaptalizing, though I like the low abv wines and it’s been a bit since I’ve added any. Of course I wouldn’t have to say when we did it as experienced tasters should be able to tell ![]()