Your ideal alcohol level for a medium/full bodied red?

WINE TALK
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Read your whole post above.

Are there European wines coming in above the stated alcohols and also outside of the margin of error mandated by the TTB?

Probably so. And by that I mean that I would bet $1000 that it is happening and in some regions with reasonable frequency.

Does that mean that all European wines are that way?

Probably not. And I would bet $50,000 on that every time the bet was offered.

There may be quite a few occurrences of that but you can’t just use the possibility/probability of those wines existence to blanket the continent. Nore to suggest that posters here are too ignorant to seek out lower abv bottles by more than just the numbers.

That said, I was in a wine shop in Portland in 2005 and the shop owner was looking at a bottle and exclaiming about how a mutual favorite producer always managed to make wines of 12.5%, even in baking hot vintages like 2003…I know the producer and he’s retired now but he never bothered to change the abv on the label regardless of vintage.

So, I’m in your camp regarding truth in labeling for abv.

Though just for your own education, you do not need to re-submit a COLA for a change in abv unless you cross the tax line. If you do cross the tax line, you would submit a new COLA but your previous one would still cover any future vintage where you wound up back on your original side of the tax line. i.e. you only need a COLA for a label above 16% and a COLA for the same wine below 16%. You don’t need to re-submit each year.

Last, I make 4000+ cases a year. And I can tell you that out of shiners with no label on them, I like the vintages with lower alcohol enough that it is the FIRST and FOREMOST thing I am focused on. Picking ripe fruit at Brix levels that without watering back will give me sub 14% abvs and sub-13% if I can. We’ve changed our farming drastically to accomplish this, and had pushback from every grower until they have the wines.

You have your world and I respect your work, and Larry’s as well. But liking lower alcohol isn’t just being fooled by labeling allowances. And I am not all knowing in this, but I am also not ignorant of the subject.

3 Likes
122

If you were the only person from Finland that I had ever interacted with, I would be sure that ABV was verified for every wine in the monopoly. :wink:

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True words Larry, but as Brian pointed out, that’s on us as an industry. And frankly, we raised the tax line to 16%, with 1.5% margin on the low side. So consumers are even less likely to know now if a wine is 15.5% or 14.0%. Brian makes quite a few points, but that one stands out for me. I don’taee how they can be castigated for utilizing information we put on our labels and don’t defend the accuracy of.

And while there may be quite a few wineries, domestic as well as import, playing games on the labels, I doubt that the 11.5% Syrah producers were fudging that much based upon your reactions to the wines. I generally look favorably on light-bodied red wines with screechy acids and lovely aromatics as the red wines I want to buy for my cellar, although I don’t hold 11.5% up as any real kind of marker. But in my experience as tannins polymerize, texture and body builds without the aid of alcohol(which restricts those lovely aromatics). Hence the popularity of Bordeaux, where abvs were often chaptalized up to 12%, until global warming removed the need for it.

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Full disclosure: I had a 15% alcohol wine last night. I didn’t even think to look at the ABV on the label, because I didn’t notice from taste that it was at all “alcoholic.” Since I sipped at it all through the Super Bowl, it never really hit me.

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Which wine?

And to be fair, I drink a decent bit of sake that is usually 15-17%. Sherry or Madeira once in a while as well. Barolo and Barbaresco as well.

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One of Nola’s Tempranillos. 2009 Privilegio.

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Happens to me a lot. I’ve even had decidedly AFWE wines - racy, acidic, quirky - which were 14,5-15,5% ABV.

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I had a 2008 Ravenswood Icon last night that was labeled at 14.9%. Was too large-scaled for me, but in truth, it was the American oak that killed it for me. The 1998 Ravenswood Monte Rossi I popped right before was awesome.

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I honestly don’t recall Icon being in American oak.

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I could be wrong David, but I don’t think so. But then again, I am wrong more often than not!

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I don’t remember. I could Google it, but isn’t the mystery more fun?

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So I Googled it, and the one “winemaker note” I ran across said French oak.

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Once in a while this happens for me, but usually it’s when the wines are younger. And I’m not sure that I can really say racy. AFWE though.

To be fair though, for bigger, red, dry wines that I would enjoy, I would look to Portugal first. Without implying that all Portuguese red wines are big wines.

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Ha!

Found archive notes from the Ravenswood website. This wine was 20 mos in 100% French oak, 40% new! Shiver me timber. Very pungent oak, consider me surprised some was not American.

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The stereotypical coconut/dill thing in very obvious American oak truly is nauseating. For my taste, Brazilian macacaúba manages the best of both worlds by structuring a wine in a sensuous, round way while still imparting very ‘classic’ and even spicy wood aromas, if that makes any sense.

I should add that I totally understand where people are coming from when they stay away from a high ABV wine in which other pointers - geography, producer, grape variety - point to a likely unpleasant experience. But there really are a lot of high ABV wines on the other end of the stylistic spectrum. The one I had in mind was Fita Preta’s (probably the most exciting producer in all of Portugal at the moment) Tinto de Castelão, which is labeled 14% but is actually close to 15% according to the LCBO’s lab. Super acidic, stemmy (30%), spicy, translucent, packed with terroir expression and personality. It has high ABV because it comes from a hot climate, but Castelão is a high acid grape.

I remember having a Marques de Cáceres Gran Reserva which I could swear was loaded with American oak, but I checked the label and nope, 100% French. It’s a good reminder not to pigeonhole our tasting patterns.

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I feel that ‘big’ and ‘overblown’ or ‘jammy’ are completely different categories, and that might be what you’re hinting at. My favorite Douro reds are often big - in structure, in alcohol, in mouth feel - and very fresh and herbal, very far from anything sickly sweet. In fact the same goes for vintage port, though with everything amped up a notch. No one would mistake Taylor VP for blueberry-chocolate sundae mixed with ethanol.

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Agreed. I find Douro reds, and reds from some of the other regions to have weight and power, but also still have good tannic structure, lots of non-fruit character, and good acidity.

To be fair, I stopped drinking traditional Port around the time I started exploring the dry reds.

I’m not anti-sweetness, I drink plenty of off-dry Mosel and Nahe wines but the 20% abv of Port is too much for me.

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The dill notes in AO are manageable with longer drying times of wood - they go away with 36 month aging, in my opinion (it’s mainly a fresh wood note). The coconut flavor is almost always there, agreed, and it’s just part of the AO DNA. Like you, I am not a fan of that coconut note at all, in fact, I hate it, but it’s manageable with light use. I can tell you that everything else about AO is superior to French, in my opinion. If you’ve ever tried a barrel of wine after 3 months on French vs American, you will know what I mean - French Oak tastes lie sucking on timber, American does not. Now, French does integrate with age, but so does American - and American starts from a more complimentary stage.

I think the key to using AO is to be very subtle with it, as its pores are much tighter and it’s just physics that it will impart a lot more notes than French due to that. If you keep the oak influence on the lighter side, to maybe 20-30% (or even less), it is in my opinion superior to French. And half the price, too.

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I never have more than a small glass, usually replacing dessert or just with a bit of cheese on the side, because yeah, it’s booze-y. The problem is finishing the bottle, which is why I end up being more of a tawny drinker, since those keep for longer.

Conceito might be the one Douro red wine for you to look into. It’s feminine/elegant, hedonistic and yet unmistakably Douro all at once, and I’m pretty sure it’s available in the US. The 2015 is singing (I find the white to be surprisingly poor in comparison).

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Thank you for this. It’s exactly what Rui Roboredo Madeira does in some of his wines that see American oak, like the basic red from Quinta da Pedra Escrita. He will use it as you describe - in a smaller percentage - giving the wines a hint of extra structure while keeping them 100% approachable young, and I like it. As for the drying I wouldn’t know, but I’d like to ask him about it.

When I mentioned the American oak stereotype, I really did mean the American oak stereotype. Like Alfert mentioned and I alluded to as well, we can sometimes recognize those unpleasant notes and it’s not even American oak in the first place.