You can measure a wine’s oxygen uptake—a proxy for its redox potential—and I think the figures he is citing here are milliliters per liter per month. He is making the comparison at the moment just after dryness when a wine’s redox potential is at its lowest. But the key point is simply that physiologically over-ripe fruit is much more susceptible to oxidation.
Yeah, exactly. And interesting that the oxidation of tannin that makes seeds more palatable to birds (and likely to humans picking on “flavor”) is detrimental to a wine’s capacity to age.
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I was taking that from the person who collected the wines and wrote the notes on the wines. You’re right, I don’t see any mention of a “natural” approach on the Wilde Farms website. However it was made, it was somewhat off, with too much VA and a trace of mousiness, which I think usually comes from too little sulfur.
Field oxidation is an interesting topic.- but it’s difficult to separate over-ripe fruit and the higher pH that comes along with this fruit. The higher the pH, the more SO2 you need to add to minimize both oxidation and bacterial issues . . .
Cheers.
Acidity and alcohol can be adjusted. As you can see from that link, if you pick past physiologically ripe you’ve allow allowed all sorts of “permanent” changes that will impact how the wine shows and its ability to age. You can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
But, it’s important to note, again, the numbers we view as normal parameters related to ripeness are not universal. There are well-regarded sites in CA, for example, that produce unusually high pH grapes, and others unusually low pH grapes.
Rootstock choice can greatly effect the sugar accumulation rate. Canopy management can, um, manage it, to some degree. Virused leaves produce less sugar. Grape variety and site can be responsible for an abnormal disparity between brix and ripeness. (For example, we had a pick each in '17 and '18 that were 19 brix. Different grapes and sites, but both peak ripeness.)
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That is low. How’d the wines turn out?
Great. The flavor and aromatics were all there, which was the point. The concern would be body due to low ABV, but they were fine. By taste, you’d probably guess they were picked in the 22-24 brix range.
As posted in a recent thread, I don’t care if the alcohol is 7% or 17%, as long as the wine is balanced.
I import Pegau. The wines (regardless of what is on the label) tend to be in the 15%+ range, occasionally hitting 16%. IMO they are balanced. To my certain knowledge, ripe high alcohol vintages age well, starting with the 1959 I enjoyed at 40+ years of age, continuing to a number of vintages from the 60s and 70s enjoyed at about 30 years of age, continuing to a bottle 1989 enjoyed late last year.
Of course if you simply don’t like high alcohol wines, or Chateauneuf du Pape, or only drink Savoie whites, your mileage will definitely vary.
I also have reasonably extensive experience with some other high alcohol wines that age well. I’ve probably had at least 50 red Bordeaux combined from the 1959 and 1961 vintages. Probably few if any of them were under 14%. I can’t remember a single one I did not thoroughly enjoy, most of them between 10 and 20 years, but at least a dozen at 30 or more.
Another category I enjoy that often has alcohol in the 15% or higher range is Zinfandel. I don’t have much experience with long ageing, but have enjoyed quite a few at 7 - 20 years.
Dan Kravitz
Dan Kravitz
Well, Grenache and Zinfandel are both grapes that ripen at high brix, and which grow in regions to which they are adapted. Not all grapes follow the same rules. Clearly, Burgundian Pinot Noir picked at the same sugar levels would be a mess—indeed, I have tasted it, and it is a generally a mess.
As for 1959 and 1961 Bordeaux being >14%, have you seen any lab analysis to confirm this? All the analysis I have seen suggests those wines made it into bottle a lot lower than that. The same is true of e.g. 1937, 1947 Burgundy (I have some of those numbers to hand and could share them if there is interest). But if you have some data that would be very interesting to see.
Grenache seems to do fine in some places where the sugars are higher at optimal ripeness, but add what several of my close winemaker friends make to my own experience, and you have a dozen or so diverse California sites where optimal ripeness yields a wine in the 13.5% ABV range.
Paul Draper says Zin tends to be at optimal ripeness in the 14.0-14.9% ABV range. I think that’s the general truth, though I’ve had excellent very mature ones from 11.2 to god-knows-what percent ABV.
William - you may have access to this more easily than the rest of us. Parker posted on his board that the ABV stated on Bordeaux was usually 12.5 back in the day just because everyone was OK with that. But he said he had some tested and it was actually much higher, at least in the more lauded vintages. It’s on his site, or what’s left of it. I don’t remember if he mentioned specific wines but I do believe he did. At any rate, I don’t remember what they were. This probably would have been around twelve years ago. Others may have better recall than I.
Dan - I don’t think anyone here is saying that no high ABV wine can age with grace. I’ve certainly had wonderful old CdPs with a fair deal of alcohol that were balanced, and I said above there are lots of zins at 14.5% to 15% that don’t show it. You’re attacking a straw man.
What we’ve been exploring is why a lot of wines with high ABVs don’t go the distance.
Why do you think those '59 and '61 Bordeauxs were over 14%? My recollection of those Parker board discussions about Bordeaux from that era was that there were some that were over 13% or so, but not the kind of level you’re talking about. There were also lots of issues with the reliability of the testing methods, at least for the really old wines.
I’ll put together some numbers today or tomorrow. I have analysis on old Clos des Lambrays back to 1919, including some vintages that taste very ripe indeed, as well as some old Napa - 60s Inglenook, Heitz. And a friend has some Bordeaux numbers, I asked him to send those. Let’s see what we discover! Note that these are all analyses of the wines taken in the last few years in a modern (i.e. ETS) laboratory. So both more accurate than historic data, and an analysis of the finished wine in bottle rather than just after fermentation. When élevage lasts three or four years, that can make a big difference to final abv.
Is that true? To my understanding, water and alcohol both evapotare both at a relatively stable rate in normal conditions (relative humidity around 50%, temperature between 10-25 degrees Celsius / 50-75 degrees Fahrenheit. The evaporation rate decreases with temperature. Things change enormously only at distillation temperatures, i.e. when the temperature is higher than the boiling point of alcohol yet lower than the boiling point of water.
Certainly the air humidity can change the things quite a bit. If relative humidity is very high (close to 100%), no more water can evaporate from the wine, so most of the evaporation is alcohol and the wine gets slightly diluted with age.
Vice versa, if the conditions are very dry: water evaporation increases and the ABV slightly increases with age.
However, to my understanding, most wineries either choose or then build their places of élevage where the air temperature would be as stable as possible in order to keep the chemical composition of the finalized wine stable.
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This is not a question of temperature but of osmotic pressure. In most cellars in Burgundy, for example, humidity is sufficient for wines to lose alcohol during élevage, often around 1 per cent per year, but it depends on the cellar. It depends on the cellar and region. Dunn in Napa Valley has a very humid cellar and they loose about 1 per cent per year, too. And back in the day, when élevage was typically longer than it is today, the impact could be even more considerable.
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I recall from those discussions on the Parker board more than a decade ago that there is a very slow loss of alcohol in the bottle over time – just enough that lab results from, say, 50-year-old wines may not reflect perfectly what their ABV was on release.
Another chemistry question, for Wes and/or Williams, I guess: Since alcohol is something of a preservative, when it’s high, does it in any way alter the evolution of other things in the wine – e.g., esters?
I have heard this, but chemist friends whom I’ve asked have generally scoffed with derision at the idea.
OK. A lurker thinks this view was promulgated by Parker to explain why very old wines were so good – they had alcohol levels at our current levels/levels he likes now. 
I’m having a hard time finding the Bordeaux data, but here are some Napa Valley & Burgundy numbers while we wait…
Napa Valley
1960 BV Georges de Latour 13.4% (pH 3.65)
1962 Inglenook 12.1% (pH 3.58)
1963 Inglenook 11.7% (pH 3.61)
1964 BV Georges de Latour 11.1% (pH 3.42)
1964 Inglenook 12.3% (pH 3.62)
1966 BV Georges de Latour 12.3% (pH 3.41)
1967 BV Georges de Latour 11.4% (pH 3.33)
1967 Heitz Martha’s 12.2% (pH 3.46)
1967 Inglenook 11.2% (pH 3.61)
Burgundy - Clos des Lambrays
1918: 13.1% (pH 3.57)
1923: 12.8% (pH 3.42) - along with the 1919, the best Clos des Lambrays I ever tasted
1934: 12.3% (pH 3.47) - * see note below
1937: 11.7% (pH 3.37)
1947: 11.6% (pH 3.45) - I would have bet money that this was >13% based on how it tastes, but not so
1950: 11.8% (pH 3.64) - a marginal vintage of lower ripeness than the preceding years, interestingly
1966: 11.7% (pH 3.54)
1971: 12.1% (pH 3.14) - with 2 g/L remaining malic acidity, all the others having completed their malo
2000: 14.2% (pH 3.54) - maybe Thierry didn’t do his sugar calculations right this year
2005: 13.5% (pH 3.45
- Note: I suspect this, as with some of the other wines, is an example of alcohol being lost during long élevage. I don’t know if Domaine des Lambrays still have harvest data, but d’Angerville do, some of which was reproduced in Allen Meadow’s Burgundy Vintages. At d’Angerville, the 1934s were picked with potential alcohols in the mid 13s, and chaptalized up to the high 13s/ low 14s (my copy is in France so I can’t refer to it for the exact numbers). I would be surprised if Clos des Lambrays had been much lower alcohol than d’Angerville’s Volnays that year. Of course, this is just speculation.
These data have no bearing on Dan’s argument about the '59 and '61 Bordeaux vintages, it’s just interesting to share. And I think it does show that wines that were thought to be quite rich and ripe and heady at the time did not make it into bottle with such high degrees as we might imagine
And just to clarify, my argument is not that high alcohol wines cannot age, merely that overripe wines tend not to age well. And while alcoholic degree is a relatively poor indication of whether a wine is over-ripe or not, it can be suggestive when one has some contextual information about the region, grape varieties and winemaking practices.
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