Tasting test
It was a tasting in St. Helena of cult Cabernets from the 2004 vintage, including Dunn’s own, that sparked his current crusade.
“I got to taste all these wines, every one of them - there were like 18 of them - and I was just disgusted at the way they tasted. And I got samples of all these wines and sent them to the lab and the average was 15.6 (percent alcohol), and I said this is the last … straw. I’ve got to do something.”
He reached out to UC Davis sensory researcher Hildegarde Heymann, curious whether the level of alcohol in wine could affect a taster’s palate. With King’s help, they gathered two dozen Cabernets. Volunteers tasted the wines in various orders: lower alcohol before higher, higher before lower, and randomly.
There was an unmistakable impact. Exact effects varied, but tasters who began with low-alcohol wines found more viscosity in higher-alcohol samples and could better discern alcohol content. Those who began with higher alcohols found the lower-alcohol samples herbal or vegetal, with a coarser texture.
It affirmed Dunn’s longtime assertion. Start with a wine at lower alcohol of around 13.8 percent, he says, and “that wine is just delicious to you.” But start with an alcohol around 15 percent, then go and taste the lower one, “and it tastes like water.”
Fight to change groupings
Of course, Napa isn’t about to wake up and return to 12 percent table wines tomorrow. Even Dunn acknowledges that “the bottom line is, they’ve got to sell these wines, and it’s really difficult to sell a Cabernet that’s less than 14 percent alcohol because you’re not going to get the good scores.”
If, he surmised, alcohol levels weren’t going to shrink, perhaps wines should be tasted in context; those below 14 percent tasted together, and the same with bigger wines. The 14 percent dividing line is hardly arbitrary; it’s the point at which the federal government levies a higher tax, which once kept many winemakers from crossing it.
But he also felt that more modest wines were the losers in a ripeness arms race - that critics’ high scores were pushing drinkers’ tastes toward that blockbuster style. “It is time for the average wine consumers, as opposed to tasters, to speak up,” Dunn wrote in a 2007 open letter.
That prompted a kind of chicken-egg aspect to the debate. Had wines gotten riper because critics praised them? Or were high scores due praise for wines that consumers happen to prefer?
The critic most targeted by Dunn’s criticism has been James Laube of the Wine Spectator. While the magazine does give higher scores to higher-alcohol wines, Laube acknowledges, "it comes down to each critic’s assessment of character and complexity based on experience and exposure to a wide range of wine, and in my case I can find examples of wines I like or like less on both sides of the ledger.
“There is plenty of room for all kinds and styles of wines. If consumers didn’t like the style of wines, they wouldn’t buy them.”
Altering alcohol levels
Dunn’s Cabernets are an acquired taste for reasons that have nothing to do with alcohol. His tough, tannic style comes from defiantly old-fashioned winemaking, including vigorous pumping of the wine with a “fire hose” and a lengthy 36-month stay in barrels.
Aside from the underground cave he built in 1989, he has brushed away most modern advances. He will not, for instance, use a sorting table, which helps winemakers remove subpar grapes and debris. Dunn makes a point of crushing his grapes with bits of stem still intact, a departure from most Napa wineries’ manicuring of their fruit in order to avoid anything that might add those fearsome herbal flavors.
Don’t mistake Dunn for a Luddite, though. While he picks his grapes at modest ripeness, even he can’t avoid tipping past 14 percent at harvest.
That has made him the rare winemaker to openly advocate perhaps the wine industry’s most secretive technique: the use of reverse osmosis equipment to alter a wine’s alcohol level. Wine is passed through a semipermeable membrane that filters out some water and alcohol, and when blended back together, the alcohol level can be dialed down without losing ripe flavors.
While such techniques are a widespread reality - by one industry estimate, up to 60 percent of California wine receives some treatment - typically it is done with utter discretion, often behind the seal of a nondisclosure agreement.
For Dunn, it is simply a newer alternative to techniques he used early in his career - in vintages when grapes arrived too ripe for his taste.
“Historically, we used to water,” he says. “We were picking in big gondolas, and then you’d tip them up over the crusher, and then you’d hose it out,” with the water dripping into the grape must below.
These days, up on the mountain, Dunn is handing more winery duties to his children. His son Mike now runs the cellar, while his daughter Kristina handles marketing. He still flies his twin-engine Turbo Commander from the nearby Angwin airstrip. This current crusade strikes me as the work of a man who has put in his time, and sees nothing to lose by tweaking a few noses.
‘They all taste the same’
Dunn is keenly aware that his sentiments put him at odds with the majority of Napa’s prestigious wineries. But there’s something intensely personal in the mix. His disdain for higher alcohol, it seems, isn’t just about scores or cooked-fruit flavors. It’s that these blockbuster wines might be sacrificing their signature of place - a place that has given Randy Dunn a good life’s work.
“In the old days, it was very easy to tell Spring Mountain from Rutherford from Stags Leap,” he says. “Now, what is it? They all taste the same. And I get this feedback from some of my old-time mailing-list people that I see in New York or D.C. or somewhere: ‘We quit buying California wines except yours.’ Well, really, why? ’ ‘Cause they all taste the same.’ And that’s right, they do.”
