I give a lot of info from the data in the post. No I am not going to name names. I’m ITB and as @Bill_Tex_Landreth says, liability
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Dustin,
Thank you for your post.
I am a little surprised but not shocked.
A few questions:
How certain are you of your own measurements (using professional lab equipment?)?
What % of the wines were within 1% of the listed alcohol?
What % of the wines were legal (within 1.5% of listed alcohol)?
I would like to think that a sampling beyond Napa, especially a sampling beyond the U.S. would have different results.
A French producer I represented until I retired was subjected to nasty attacks on various boards (I believe the attacker was banned). She was listing her wines at 14%, when the average was 15%. But this was at a time when the “dessert” wine tax kicked in at 14%, instead of today’s 16%. Nowadays she uses 14.5%, with reality at 15 - 15.5%.
I would be curious as to the experiences of other board members. I don’t have equipment, if anybody can recommend an accurate, inexpensive tool, I would start to compile some data.
Any chance that you can run a regression of actual alcohol on stated alcohol? Given all the discussion of correlations, I’m super curious about intercept, slope, and R-squared.
If statistics are not your thing, you could email me csv file to reuterj@bc.edu with the two sets of numbers (and nothing else) and I could run the regression and share the results. Of course, I’ll understand if you want to leave things where they currently stand.
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That’s where my head was going too. I’d love to know if there is correlation here, and if so, what’s the strength of it (and does it match my subjective perception, or not!).
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You mean like Bordeaux producers did for a number of years or even decades?
Hi Dan,
Very confident in the results. They are not done by me but rather via an independent lab. Let me explain the rationale for this - I have a vineyard and had been selling grapes but decided to start making wine. I went into it with many preconceived ideas and directives. I was sure I wanted -
brighter, fresher wine style (Ph for sure under 3.8)
Not make a wine over 15% alc
never use more than 50% new oak
never use additives (tannins, enzymes etc.)
I wanted to make the most natural wine possible from my estate vineyards. Then our winemaker came back to me and said, well what are the wines you like? I mentioned a few producers and he said, have you ever run the numbers on those wines? I obviously said no and his reply was, you should take a sample of the next 10 wines you open and send it to the lab to have numbers run… you will be very surprised… So I did just that. But… I didn’t stop there. I thought If I was embarking on the huge decision of starting a new wine brand I wanted to understand as best I could the real competition and what those wines looked like from a chemical perspective.
With that said, I started sending all the wines I opened to the lab for analysis and started a spreadsheet listing the labeled alcohol, real alcohol, PH, TA, RS, and VA. I then left that row in either neutral color (indifferent) highlighted green (a wine I really liked) or red (disliked).
Once I compiled around 25 or so data points, I became enamored with this data. The preconceived ideas I had about wine were debunked. At around 25 wines, I sorted my data by green (my supposed favorites) and many of my favorite wines were above 15% alcohol and PH north of 3.8 and I thought how could this be?? I must just need more data points…So, I continued just racking up lab fees until I reached 70 or so data points and stopped. Now I just send one here and there when I am just curious about a wine. What all the data told me was, many good wines are above 15.3 and Ph’s above 3.8. When I sort all the green rows (wines I really liked), it gives me a great foundation for understanding what I like in Napa Valley Cabernet and what those wines look like from a chemistry perspective.
Sorry for the long-winded post.
to answer your other question - How many wines are within 1% of the stated alc. (1% is the actual legal variance limit) - 46/78 wines.
Regarding euro wines, I have only run 3 French Bordeaux and they were pretty close.
2005 Pontet Canet - labeled 13% actual 13.3
2005 Haut-Bailey - labeled 13% actual 13.2
2005 Chateau Angelus - labeled 14.5% and actual 14.5%
Hope this is interesting and helpful. My only goal in sharing this data is to just open people’s eye’s to the real alcohol levels vs. labeled in many high-end wines.
cheers,
Dustin
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i dont and i dont think anyone does. it’s beneath a goofy proposition.
Did you also run total phenolics numbers on those wines? Total tannins? Do you know which one of those might’ve had alcohol removed? And do you know what percentage of new Oak each of those had?
There are so many variables that it’s almost impossible to reverse engineer a Wine.
It just is not that simple folks. But love that discussion 
Sorry if that came across as a bit snarky. It wasn’t. Just really curious. Also what did you learn in this analysis? Do you still want to make wines with the parameters that you thought you did?
I wasnt trying to reverse-engineer the wines (I did not run phenolics on all 78 samples). My winemaker made the suggestion because of how strongly I originally felt regarding acidty and Alcohol levels.
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Thank you for the reply and for the data. It is very interesting. So now that your preconceived notions are debunked, what are the chemistries of the wines that you’ve actually produced so far? Curious to hear.
would you be willing to share your spreadsheet as a read only google sheet? would love to see the data
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As wrote above, I thought a wine above 15% alc. was a no-go. However, the data when viewing my favorites (18 wines) showed an avg. alcohol level of 15.2 with a high of 16.2 which was OMG (and that 16.2 is a WB darling and a very delicious wine!)… So, what it told me was to let go of those bumpers and focus more on freshness of fruit, fermentation techniques, and cooperage impact. We have two vintages in the cellar and are very happy with the results so far.
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Thank you for the reply. Would you care to share the chemistries on the two vintages you have in seller right now? Really curious to hear where they ended up. Thank you!
Dustin,
Thank you for that very detailed and thoughtful reply.
From time to time on this board I have written positive notes about a (very) few wines at 16% or higher. I was excoriated for using the word ‘balanced’ for one of them, but that’s what it tasted like to me.
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More than one winemaker has promoted the idea that if you work the vineyards right and make the wine right, a table wine can handle over 15% alc and the pH can be around 4. Indeed, if you look at the pHs of various Pomerols, they are not low.
I would be nervous if the pH of my wine was over 3.8, but then the last time I studied chemistry Jack Kennedy was president so what do I know…or remember.
My comment on these wines is–like Dan Kravitz–I did not notice the alcohol and enjoyed them.
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My guess is that there has been a big shift towards making many cabs and Bordeaux releases with higher pHs - whether it be based on ‘style changes’ or global warming.
The higher pH will add a ‘lushness’ to the wine - something that so many modern cabs have.
Back in the day, it was ‘riskier’ to have wines with higher pHs, but that was before ‘modern science’ created products and processes that made things a bit less risky.
Cheers
He’s charging $275 a bottle because people will buy all the 130 cases he made of that wine. Its a bummer that the little farm town of Napa is the way it is with mega rich outsiders buying land or creating labels as a side hustle/vanity project. Its raising the bottle cost up and up and up. They keep doing it because at the end of the day people are buying the wine. Even the mega rich would pull the plug on said project if people didn’t buy the wine.
Pricing may stay flat for a while who knows 
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You think?
This project is far less interesting than, say, impensata for example and it’s clear that impensata has not had a ton of success with sales…
Seems to me way more likely that these end up on reduced price bargain sites
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What makes you say that? IMO not all of these vanity projects wind up with buyers.
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