I am sharing a recent article by Dan Berger, one of my currently favored wine writers, along with Gerald Asher and Kermit Lynch. The “sweetening of wine” and homogeneity of California wines (particularly Napa CS) has had me on my “Shetland pony” for some time. This article provides me with some credible background on what is happening. The first half of the article observes the state of the wines and “sweetening” in general. The latter part, at least for me, gives some of the chemistry and oenology perspective. For a number of you, the interplay of PH, acidity, residual sugar and tannins is basic knowledge. Berger’s explanation was revelatory for me, especially as it relates to the aging of fine wine (remember that??).https://open.substack.com/pub/napavalleyfocus/p/dan-bergers-wine-chronicles-the-sweet?r=2ec7cc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
I’m not knowledgeable enough, but to me, this is a perfect article to support some of the conversations I’ve had about Napa and California wines in general (obviously not all of them, but unfortunately more rule than exception).
My wife and I quite often describe them as too sweet for us, given the style they’re going for. Restaurant staff and wine shop folks look at us like we’re crazy, though we might be 
. “But this is a very dry wine,” we’re told. I’d like to respond, “Then why do I have the finish of Welch’s grape juice and high fructose corn syrup?”
“Chateau Cache-Fleau” 
‘Dry’ and ‘sweet’ are and will always be relative terms. Even forgetting about the confusion between ‘fruit sweet’ and ‘RS, we will always run across differences in perception.
That subject may be a good one, but the fact that author seems to think that pH and acidity are different things is indicative of a lack of technical knowledge that impedes arriving at any more than speculative conclusions. I do not think that there is any basis for thinking that high alcohol is per se an impediment to aging, and there are plenty of examples of high pH red wines aging very well, at least over the 30-40 year spectrum, on the condition that they are not made from overripe fruit. Caymus is also atypically sweet at the high end: even The Prisoner, when I have sent it to the lab, is generally only around 5g/l RS. The perception of sweetness is not necessarily indicative of elevated levels of residual sugar (though it may be indicative of overripe fruit).
I’m curious what factors cause wines made with overripe fruit to not age well?
My basic understanding is that acidity and tannins are the two primary factors that make dry wines age-worthy (also sugar for sweet wines).
I think @Otto_Forsberg noted in a post recently that alcohol can turn into acetaldehyde in bottle, so wines that are high alcohol can develop “off” aromas sooner than lower alcohol wines with age just because there is more alcohol that can break down into acetaldehyde. (if I mischaracterized this, I apologize)
I’m interested in learning how overripe fruit also plays a role in the aging process.
Thanks in advance.
While acidity and tannins are two primary factors, I think pH is an even more important factor (as wines high in TA can still have higher pH than a wine with a somewhat lower of TA - acidity and pH don’t necessarily go hand in hand).
Well, close enough. The point was that people usually think that high alcohol results in better ageability, just because wines like Port wine and Madeira are high in alcohol. However, an oxidized wine is typically one with elevated levels of acetaldehyde - and a wine high in alcohol simply has more of that stuff to oxidize into acetaldehyde and other byproducts of alcohol oxidation. Furthermore, usually wines high in alcohol are made with very ripe grapes that also high in pH - and wines high in pH are more susceptible to oxidation. In short, there so many interconnected things in this subject - there is not just one simple chain of cause and effect.
I read this article and disliked it. I have enjoyed some of Dan Berger’s wine writing, but I really dislike this thing he’s been doing where he tries to draw some distinction between what he calls “commonplace wine” and “fine wine”, and then lumps anything that is on the softer, plusher, or (barely) sweeter side in as “commonplace wine”. And this gets tangled up with his aversion to high-pH red winemaking, which boggles my mind. I don’t like the distinction to begin with, but if you give it any thought at all it starts falling apart. Where do fine examples of Condrieu and Loire Chenin fall in to this discussion? Hermitage? Let alone the hundreds of fine examples of delicious Napa Cabernets and Paso Rhones. Dan Berger says, in a different column, “Fine table wines are dry” - is that so? Some are, others aren’t. It’s a matter of style.
Anyway, you cannot point to the Wagner and Hope family wines, sweetened as they are to 10-30 g/L of sugar, and then use the sugar content of a Caymus Cabernet as an indication that many supposedly fine Napa wines are getting sweetened to match consumer tastes. Caymus and Meiomi and the like may sell large volumes, but the vast majority of wines and labels coming out of Napa are dry. I’m not just speculating here, I have analyzed the chemistry of hundreds of Napa wines, and the vast majority are bone dry, having at most a couple of grams per liter of residual sugar. I’ve also run blind sensory panels where people taste the same wine at different sugar levels, and, with very few exceptions, people cannot differentiate between wines that have no sugar and wines that have a couple of grams per liter.
I think that there are serious discussions to be had about how alcohol (or is it ripeness?) impact aging, and am happy to participate in such conversations, but if high alcohol alone meant that wines couldn’t age then, taking an extreme example to make the point, there’d be no fun in drinking old vintage Port.
I think this is an important point worth highlighting. There’s a lot we don’t know about what makes wines improve, hold, or deteriorate with age, but overripeness seems to be a bad thing. Because overripeness can also be correlated with high pH and high alcohol, it is tempting - and specious - to infer a causative relationship between high pH or alcohol and poor ageability.
Overripe fruit declines in antioxidant capacity as anthocyanins form oxidative structures.
We have gotten into this before: High alcohol wines and aging - #97 by Otto_Forsberg
Funny wine he’s trying. All the wines I drink from California, many board favorites here and often from a “newer” generation - are all dry.