Alcohol levels are the bugaboo that get all the blame for hobbling wine and rendering it—depending on your guru—hot and rich or thin and light. The government was right to require alcohol content on labels as a way to inform us how drunk we can expect to get. But do you really believe a Washington bureaucrat can tell you which wine you’ll like best? And do you want him to?
As wine drinkers who presumably are interested in the enjoyment of wine apart from its inebriating effects, we must consider a host of equally significant components that can’t be itemized without effort.
The percentage of alcohol is easy to focus on because it’s a number. But other numbers equally important to a wine’s integrity are ignored, either because they’re difficult to measure or, more importantly, they’re equally useless in predicting how a wine will taste.
How about wanting to know a red wine’s level of large and small polymeric pigments, or the amount of iron-reactive phenols or free anthocyanin (all in mg/L, of course)? Some producers publish on back labels the amount of tartaric acid in their wines. Perhaps we should include the amount of residual sugar on the label. Or the pH. We could talk about these, as well, because they’re equally worthy of discussion.
These measurable attributes of wine are interesting but tell us little out of context, and that context is our mouth.
Now let’s describe alcohol in words. Some wines at 12.5 % are thin, light, green and unfulfilling. And some wines at 16% are thick and rich, hot and exhausting. Is the alcohol content alone to blame? Is it, in fact, the best candidate to describe how a vintage played out, whether it was warm or cool, dry or rainy? Is alcohol even a good indicator for what a winemaker or vineyard worker did?
Winemakers worry about many more things than alcohol. Most importantly, did we pick the grapes at the right time? And that hand-wringing continues through whether any dissolved oxygen was absorbed at bottling. Along the way we taste to confirm that we picked at the perfect time, that we managed the fermentation well, and that we’ve kept spoilage bugs away, among many other things.
We can’t well predict what a wine will taste like based on its alcohol content alone. If we must talk in numbers, any discussion about alcohol should include an equally serious investigation about tannins, color, acidity, etc.
Does knowing the chemistry behind wine increase its pleasure? Maybe, but probably only insofar as knowing that the Mallard reaction is the responsible mechanism behind the delicious browning of meat. Until the numbers all make sense together there is always enjoyment to be had simply drinking wine.