I, too, thought it was fascinating, bot only in the sense that it was very confusing and didn’t sound that scientific. I was wondering if those odd terms like “oxygen hungry” or “oxygen appetite” were somehow related to the redox potential of the wine, which is an actual, scientific phenomenon.
Because of the confusing terms, I really didn’t understand the last paragraph at all. I think the piece didn’t clearly really say which wines had a tendency toward oxidation and which weren’t and for what reasons.
There’s really no comparison between air-dried and late harvest botrysized wines, on the one hand, and very ripe dry wines on the other. With the former, the grapes stop ripening at some point as it gets cooler. Then they just shrivel or get rotten or freeze, losing large amounts of water, and that concentrates everything in the grapes – sugar and acid.
With dry wines like cabs and chardonnays, the acid simply drops as the grape sugars rise. There’s a small amount of concentration from dessication on the vine if it’s warm, but nothing like the amount you get with air-dried, botrysized or frozen grapes, so it doesn’t make up for the acid lost from ripening.The point of picking late isn’t to dry out the grapes (at least not primarily); it’s about sugars and the flavors.
Also, I assume you’re talking about German rieslings, and those grow in a relatively cool climate, so acids tend to be relatively high even in very ripe grapes. Remember that even top dry rieslings rarely come in over 14%, and many are well below that level.
I’m not Fred, but here’s my take on what he’s saying.
Redox addresses oxidation (and reduction, but unfortunately wine has co-opted reduction to mean something completely different). But oxidation is a, hopefully, small part of how oxygen participates with/in wine. The bigger role is oxygen binding in various ways with other molecules…often in forming new molecules (wine appears to be a continuous process of molecules splitting apart and reforming), or buffering, etc. Some wines have a greater need & use for oxygen molecules (e.g. to bind with), and those wines will be less prone to oxidation because there will be less free/dissolved oxygen available to cause problems. This I believe is the ‘hand wavy science’ for what Fred was referring to by oxygen appetite.
Also, wine is complicated and we’re still scratching the surface on our understanding of the science of wine. For example, we’re still trying to get a firm grasp on the perception of acidity (e.g. the weak acids in wine). The combination of pH + TA (titratable acidity, which basically is total acidity). The pH contribution to perception makes sense, free ions and all, tho pH appears to be the minor part between the two. But why TA (the difference between pH and TA, essentially, are the acid molecules that still have bound hydrogen ions)? A current theory is when acid molecules go inside taste buds that their bound ions suddenly become unbound (I’m assuming they rebind later), making the wine appear to have a lower pH than it really does. But I don’t thing this is a generally agreed upon theory yet.
A second problem (with perception of acidity): compare/taste a wine with the same wine with 0.05 grams/liter of citric acid added. From both a pH and TA perspective, this two will be so similar as to be considered the same. Yet the taste of the citric added sample will have a much higher acid perception. Not much direct relevance to wine, (except grapes can have tiny amts of citric acid in them) but it does cause problems with our general understand of this area.
And there are a million other topics to understand about the aging and perception of wine. Unless we make more progress, describing observations like Fred did is the better option. Also, Fred’s writings (and wine) are always well thought out and worth the effort to explore in my experience (not that Otto said/implied differently, but thought I’d point that out anyways).
I have found that some Cal Cabs age very well and others don’t…The vast majority of non WB winedrinkers cd care less about aging as they rarely cellar wines and consume most of them within 3 months or less from date of purchase…Quite a few wines are tailormade for early gratification…My meager stash of Bryant drank very well early on, none survived for me to test re ageability…I had a pretty good sized stash of both the basic 1970 BV Cab and the 1970 Georges de L Private Reserve…both aged gracefully and drank well over a period of > 20 yrs… a 1992 Dominus provided magnificent drinking this week…Fred’s OMV zins scream for aging…and reward it!!Dave Rafanelli’s Zins and Cabs drink well early on…and also age terrifically…Fred’s wines will never be accused of being over the top while some might say that Dave’s wines are…Yet they both age beautifully…To my taste, a lot of Bedrock and Carlisle wines are over the top…but they reward cellaring, indeed for my palate they require cellaring. Point of my rambling post is that not everyone has a cellar…If you have one, you probably built it with aging in mind…go for it…If not, tailor your drinking to earlier drinking wines and don’t sweat what wine geeks and critics say about aging.
When you say they age, do you mean they survive are alive or they develop secondary qualities? There are lots of California reds that are very much alive at 20+ years, but in my experience few get more complex, as opposed to simply having more resolved tannins.
FYI, I had a '70 BV Reserve in 2009 from the winery’s inventory that was superb, and someone I know was able to get a half case from the winery that several of us shared. Unfortunately, every bottle since then has been over the hill – not shot, but well past its prime. I was surprised, frankly. If there was any wine from that era that I would have thought would go 40+ years, that was it, but it didn’t.
While it’s substantially younger, I had an '86 Ch. Leoville Poyferre tonight that is evolving slowly but has significant secondary qualities even though there’s a lot of tannin. That’s 31/32 years old and I expect that to be at a wonderful stage at 40 years – better than tonight.
I tend to avoid technical jargon and try to describe things in terms a layperson might be able to grasp. Often, I am criticized for this and remain unrepentant.
Eric did a nice job of elaborating on some points. I think of redox potential as analogous to pH while ‘oxygen appetite’ as analogous to total acidity. Redox potential and ‘oxygen appetite’ are related yet describe different aspects of the system.
Otto, I’ll try to explain the last paragraph: Since people tend to associate ABV and ripeness level, I intended to illustrate an example where ABV does not accurately track ripeness level (fortified wine). additionally, I believe that the capacity of Zinfandel phenolics to incorporate Oxygen is less than other varieties often found growing with and/or blended with Zinfandel. Therefore, one could have hyper-ripe Zinfandel blended with a small amount of modestly ripe/Oxygen hungry grapes which will result in a high ABV wine which still has tremendous Oxygen scavenging capacity.
Hence a disconnect between ABV and aging capacity…
Jon, while I don’t know the specific details to their vineyard sources, I would suggest that the Rafanelli, Bedrock and Carlisle Zins have a sufficient proportion of non-Zinfandel, more oxygen hungry varieties to carry that higher apparent ripeness level of the Zinfandel. My Zinfandel is essentially 100% Zinfandel. It requires a different approach, it seems to me. The wines’ shapes are dictated by the material.
John: from my memory, the basic 1970 BV’s improved through the mid 1980’s and then plateaued through the early 1990’s when I finished the last of a case…The Reserve followed a similar path, peaking in my estimation around 2000 but still drinking very well when I finished the last of a case of it around 2005 or 6 if memory serves. Both cases were obtained directly from the winery… The 1992 Dominus was spectacular this week but I don’t really see much room for improvement, it will probably survive quite nicely for another 5 yrs or so…
Petite Sirah for sure. Alicante Bouschet, probably. Carignane. There are others: Abouriou/Early Burgundy is an example.
A little Petite can go a long way. I think it’s a great combination with Zinfandel, even though I don’t do that myself. The fact that the Petite Sirah vines ripen later than the Zin make their O2 appetites more fierce when harvested together.
Syrah should be a contender nowadays. It works so well with Grenache.
This has been my empirical experience with Ridge Zins. Almost without exception, I can predict how well an aged bottle of Ridge Zin will perform just by looking at the percentage of Petite Sirah in the blend.
Well, the thing is, that some technical jargon can go a long way. I think by underestimating readers and using oversimplifications you can often cause more confusion than clarify things. For example I have some trouble with the term “oxygen appetite”, because it sounds like these “oxygen-hungry wines” would actively seek to dissolve any available oxygen, much more so than those “less oxygen hungry wines”.
But it is perfectly true that different wines can take different amounts of oxygen - it is often related to high pH and low amount of phenolics, but there are lots of other variables to it, so you really can’t say off the bat that a low-acid, low-phenolic wine would oxidize faster than a high-axid, high-phenolic wine. That, however, is very often the case: Grenache is a variety considered to have propensity to oxidize easily, and it is also normally rather low in phenolics with high pH. It’s vice versa for Nebbiolo.
However, Syrah is often considered to be a variety which has a tendency to go easily reductive, even if it was quite low in acidity and phenolics (the components that normally would protect the wine against oxygen). This probably would translate to an “oxygen-hungry wine” in your winespeak. Mourvèdre is another such variety. This also explains the classic GSM blend: normally the blend is 50% Grenache and the rest Syrah and/or Mourvèdre. In this way Grenache’s tendency to oxidize and the more reductive character of Syrah and/or Mourvèdre effectively cancel each other out.
Also, all these varieties hover at around 14-15% ABV in Southern Rhône, so this capability to take oxygen is obviously unrelated to ABV. I guess why ABV is considered to affect the capability of taking oxygen is basically because of how ripeness (ABV) and drop in acidity often go hand in hand. If you have a Syrah picked at 13,5% and a Syrah picked up from the same spit at 15%, both vinified the same way, the lower-ABV (higher-acidity) wine is most likely more capable of taking oxygen than the higher-ABV one. However, a wine with high ABV but low tendency towards oxidation can take much more oxygen than a low-ABV high-acidity wine that is otherwise easily oxidized.
But, unlike you said, I think that these elements are related to the redox potential. It’s just that the redox potential is much more complicated than just a few variables like ABV or pH. For example, Zinfandel has a tendency to oxidize much easier than Carignan or Petite Sirah, which have a tendency to be more reductive, so the act just the same as Syrah and Mourvèdre to Grenache in a Rhône blend.
You can’t just substitute “ABV” for “brix”. Especially not when you’re trying to nitpick terminology with an accomplished winemaker. Also, equating sugar accumulation with ripeness is highly flawed, as you yourself seem to sort of acknowledge with your qualification of Syrah from the same “spot”, whatever that means. Not just site, but same soil, aspect and clonal make up, among many other things? Yeah, control every single other more important variable and sugar accumulation becomes a rough, still imperfect, metric for hang time.