Supersize my wine! 8 November 2005

Chris Mullineux looks at what's behind today's monster blockbuster wines, and argues for a gentler. more elegant alternative

One of the things I’ve enjoyed the past few weeks is following the debates on this website and elsewhere on alcohol levels, phenological ripeness and more natural winegrowing methods. I’ve been particularly interested, as these are some of the fascinating things I was exposed to on my recent working stint in southern France. These issues lie at the very heart of premium wine production today, and it’s exciting that people are debating them in the open. But to understand these issues we should first recognise that they are part of a much bigger picture.

The fact is that high-end producers have for the past few decades been making wines for consumers who are, for the most part, relatively new to wine. These consumers don’t seem to be short of cash, but they do lack the experience and confidence to make their own decisions on what wines to splurge on. So, they buy their wines based on the judgment of critics and performance in competitions.

This (along with changes in viticulture) has caused a movement towards extract and concentration in wines, as producers are forced to resort to tricks that will see their wine stand out in the crowd. Winemakers nowadays approach wine from a completely different paradigm as they did 25 years ago. We no longer start with the ideal of balance or elegance – instead, we aim for concentration above all things, and worry about balance later. BIG wines stand out in tastings, elegant wines don’t. It’s as simple as that.

Optimal and/or extreme?
So, we pick very late – with all the extracting we do, the tannins cannot be anywhere near green! Winemakers call this optimal phenological ripeness, but it’s more like extreme phenological ripeness. We can harvest earlier without getting green or bitter tannins in the wine, but then it won’t be as big.

In the cellar we add enzymes and tannins, do sulphuric macerations, bleed tanks, remove water with reverse osmosis and spinning cones, flash heat the must, and then pigeage (up to 12 times a day!), delestage and remontage the hell out of the wine as it ferments. Anything for more extract. (Excuse all the French, and don’t worry too much about what the technicalities – basically it’s a lot of work for the winemaker and for the wine!)

We then micro-oxygenate and cliquage young wines to polymerise their monster tannins into something softer, and whip them into shape with oodles of new wood, as this gives more sweetness to stand out in big tastings. Some even add a gram or two of sugar before bottling (yes, on reds) to give the impression of a fuller palate!

Balance is worried about later, as it can be manipulated in the cellar by adding water and acids, or fining and filtering out excessive tannins and high alcohols. High alcohol levels at the end of fermentation are actually regarded as a good thing, as they help to break down cell walls in the skins of grapes, further aiding the extraction process. Don’t worry though, when you’re paying a lot for a bottle of wine, the winemaker can afford to remove it with reverse osmosis (along with some water… conveniently further increasing the concentration). He’ll add the cost of this expensive process to the sales price, but the consumer won’t worry, because it’ll probably score more than 90 points, and he’ll be happy and vindicated when he opens the expensive bottle to find it does indeed bowl him over.

The problem is that most of these high scoring wines are simply too much to drink. They might stand out in tastings, but they need 8 people to finish a bottle. I don’t mind paying a lot for a bottle of wine, but I do feel cheated when I cannot finish it with a friend!

And in the vineyard too
Modern viticulture exacerbates the problem. Because soils are dead, we have to feed vines fertilisers – which are the fast food of the agricultural industry. The similarity between the two is striking. Fertilizers are basically salts, which dissolve very easily in water, and are quickly taken up by vines. This is great, because the vines grow quickly (like humans do on a diet of MacDonald’s) and evenly. But, like anything that takes in a lot of salt, the osmotic balance is disturbed in the vines, and they become thirsty. So, they take up more water, with more salts… it’s a never-ending cycle. What happens is that all this water drives photosynthesis at an increased rate, and the vines give 15 per cent alcohol before the winemaker is happy with the tannins and flavor. Your wine has been Supersized!

Alternatives
But it’s not all doom and gloom.

There is, and always has been, a group of wine drinkers (mostly from cultures that have been drinking wine for a long time) who appreciate balance and elegance. The very fact that people are complaining and debating about excessive alcohols is a sign that others, who are relatively new to wine, are waking up too. There is a market for balanced, elegant wines, and it’s growing.

The question that most will ask is how can we, in warm and sunny South Africa, harvest earlier and still get phenological ripeness? Well, this is exactly what I experienced working this year in the equally warm and sunny Languedoc. Jancis Robinson recently wrote of the example of Gérard Gauby (from the Roussillon, essentially the hottest part of France) who is making impressive wines, harvesting reds at round 12 per cent. He is not the only producer from the area doing so. The domaine where I worked this year was doing the same, and we regularly tasted other high quality wines from the region with similarly low alcohol levels. What’s crazy is that many of these producers don’t even destem – something that surely brings astringency to the wine!

These guys mostly tend to farm organically or biodynamically, so have less vigorous vines, which photosynthesise slower. They plant varieties properly suited to their climates. You don’t find a lot of Cab or Merlot in the Languedoc (or Pinotage for that matter – with its bitter back palate, this is a variety that is seriously guilty of making us in the Cape get in a mind-frame of harvesting late!). They are not adding enzymes and tannins; they don’t bleed the must or make use of reverse osmosis, spinning cones or flash heating. They might do one gentle pigeage a day, or work with a submerged cap, but that’s it. They’re not excessively working the must, so they’re not extracting any astringency. And finally, to not overpower the wine, they make use of mostly big (500 litres and above), older wood for maturation. 

There is no big secret in obtaining phenological ripeness at lower alcohol levels. The answer lies in getting back into the paradigm of balance and elegance.