As mentioned here Drinking German Riesling Young vs Old - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers, some Rieslings can go through a bit of numb phase. If you can’t commit to five-seven years of laying down, it may be as well to drink them young.
Love the technical discussion. Thanks all.
Have been adding Riesling, slowly, to my collection and this thread is helping me understand ability/opportunity to age.
Thanks, and no problem. You can only play the facts you’re dealt, eh? Are there particular producers or vineyards that are more well known for developing (or not developing) petrol with the kind of age you are talking about? Being a non-expert and given the obvious QPR, I tend to just buy a few bottles of JJ Prüm Wehlener Sonnenuhr each year. Seems like a pretty easy “no lose” strategy unless it turns out that those are especially noted for petrol with age…
When did sulphur start getting added? Does 47 cheval have sulphur.
The Ancient Romans used it. Prevalent in Germany during the Middle Ages. I’ve never partaken of the 1947 Cheval Blanc, but I’m assuming they used loads.
Not entirely (the bolded part). The yeast doesn’t usually convert all of the sugar to alcohol, even if “left alone” without adding sulfur, chilling, or removing the yeast. How close the ferment gets to fully dry depends on how much sugar is there to begin with, the strain of the yeast (its efficiency and ability to function as alcohol levels increase), and other factors like temperature. You always end up with some % of unfermented juice/unconverted sugar.
And cellars in Germany are rather cold, which inhibits the little yeasties.
But David I think it’s different than that. An 8% kabinett isn’t even close to getting where it needs to go. It’s a fact kabinetts don’t ferment through like 99 percent of wine. Most kabinetts stop at 8 percent but should ferment dry to 12 percent give or take. The question is how do they age because there’s a bunch of sugar juice left and sulphur making it stop. I truly don’t know. Maybe normal wine aged the same, better or worse. Would love to know people’s thoughts.
You do realize that in addition to being slightly off with all your premises, you are also asking the most basic question about wine that has never been answered: how does it really age. We know there are reactions going on, but nobody has ever cracked the code for everything that is going on.
If you want to know how they age buy some old ones. They aren’t expensive.
I think you’ve missed the point that German winemakers no longer rely primarily on sulfur to stop fermentation. Now the rely on filtering or other techniques to eliminate the yeast. Without yeast, the sugar will remain unfermented.
Some heavily sulfured sweet wines such as pre-1980s Loires aged at a glacial pace. But the sulfur also bleached the wines so they remained pail even after decades. And you got a lot of sulfur aromas. So the longevity came at a price.
As David B said, Kabinetts in the last couple of decades, since sulfur doses have been lower, seem to be aging very nicely, without the stink. (I would add 2002 as another year where the Kabinetts are also shining.)
FYI, sugar is a preservative, which helps so long as the yeast is gone.
John, I think they still use sulphur to stop fermentation. What makes you think otherwise?
As I understand it, they do use some sulfur but in combination with temp-control to halt fermentation and/or filtration to get rid of yeast.
Certainly the wines show much less sulfur on the nose than they did when I first started attending tastings in the 1980s.
I was wrong. I looked into this very briefly just now. I will try to find more information. Maybe you know of some examples or have more insight here than I do. I do think that modern cooling equipment has allowed fermentation to be stopped with a lot lower addition of SO2 than they used to us. What I was thinking of, though, is the idea that fermenting to dryness (or as close as it will get) and adding sussreserve has become far more common than halting fermentation. It is mentioned here schiller-wine: German Wine Basics: How does a sweet German Riesling become sweet? that
In recent years, adding Suessreserve has become the preferred method.
I do remember reading that it’s a lot more common now among high quality producers for Kabinett and Spatlese to ferment to dryness and then add sussreserve for sweetness, but it’s possible that I’m not remembering quite correctly or that it isn’t as widespread as I think. Do you find that a lot of producers still halt fermentation at their desired level of residual sugar?
Anyway, its safe to say that regardless of the method of production, far less SO2 exists in today’s wines at the time of bottling than in the wines of decades before the '90s.
This is the best answer. All of the theoretical talk of how and why is interesting, but as David mentioned, no one really knows the complex chemistry of how wines develop with age. We don’t need to if we know how the wines taste, which you can find out very easily and without spending a whole lot in the case of German Kabinett. You’ll learn a LOT more that way (by tasting the wines) than this thread could ever tell you about what you want to know.
Doug, as far as I know quality Mosel producers don’t add sussreserve.
As for lower sulphur now than 40 years ago. I have no evidence for that, nor do I have many wines from the 70s and 80s in the cellar.
There is a long history of German kabinetts aging very well when they come from top producers and top terroir. You would be better off learning the top producers and the top terroir. I doubt wineries like Zilliken and Prum have forgotten how to make kabinetts that age. I will let them focus on how to make it and I focus on drinking it.
Sussreserve has largely gone the way of the dinosaurs, except for volume wines.
At least according to the producers I speak with, sulfur levels are lower than in the past.
Thanks for the insight and correction, Russell and David.
This is a common misconception, but actually sulfur doesn’t really inhibit oxidation - at least as much as temperature does. This is because chemical reactions are affected by temperature and oxidation is a chemical reaction that happens more slowly in cooler temperatures and more rapidly in warmer. Also pH has an effect to some processes and IIRC lower pH also inhibits some reactions related to oxidation.
Sulfites, instead of inhibiting oxidation, inhibit growth of micro-organisms. How sulfites work with oxidation is they gob up the compounds resulting from oxidation. This might seem as nitpicking, but there’s a big difference in the actual process. Normally as wine oxidizes, aldehydes are produced - at a set temperature, this is a process that happens at a rather constant rate, no matter if there is sulfur in the wine or not. When there’s no sulfur, these aldehydes are not bound up and thus one can smell them as they accumulate in the wine. Thanks to how our brains work, human nose recognizes the aroma of aldehydes as the result of oxidation, making people normally think that the wine is (or is getting) oxidized at this point (this also explains why people normally think that Fino Sherry - a wine with high levels of aldehydes - is oxidized, even when it clearly isn’t).
When there is sulfur in the wine, the sulfites bind the aldehydes that result from the oxidation and the wine doesn’t appear oxidized, even with some considerable age to it. However, one should know that these aldehydes are not bound forever - every now and then they break free, but if there are any free sulfites in the wine, they get bound up again. However, when all the free sulfites are exhausted, the wine starts to smell more and more oxidized as it ages - this is not only because of the aldehydes that form as the alcohol oxidizes, but also as the bound aldehydes slowly break free and there are no sulfites to hide them any more. This also explains why some wines can feel very youthful for remarkably long and then they start to fall apart in a very short period of time.
Sorry about the nitpicking. Thought that some people might find it interesting to know how sulfites actually work.
Using some of my experience in water systems, sulfites are used as oxygen scavengers.
2SO32- + O2 → 2SO42
Gobbling up the oxygen.