Better wines, but what about the soul? 30 August 2006

Winemakers talk to Tim James about new regulations allowing high-tech removal of
alcohol from their wines

What great strides we have made! One of the pioneers of bordeaux-style blends in the Cape in the early nearly three decades back, the late Billy Hofmeyr of Welgemeend, was content with an alcohol level of  around 12 percent in his wines: to go much higher would be to deviate too far from the classic model. (And, incidentally, I would defy anyone to find ‘green’ flavours or ‘unripe tannins’ in the best wines of the early 1980s, from Welgemeend, Delheim, Meerlust and Kanonkop!)

Hofmeyr would have been disappointed, I suspect, to taste some of the ultra-ripe, porty monsters coming now from his beloved Bordeaux; he’d have been surely amazed to see the average alcohol levels regularly achieved in serious wines from the Cape. Recently proofreading the forthcoming Platter Guide I noticed with a little shock more than a few wines applauded for their ‘low’ or ‘lowish’ acohols of 13.5 percent!

But tastes, like truth, change with time, and it hasn’t taken much work from the Australian and Californian models and their admirers in England and America to change tastes in wine: ripeness nowadays is all, and high alcohols come with the fashionable flavours and rich power so widely sought. But some worry, amongst most critics and winedrinkers alike, sets in when wines regularly go over, say, 14 percent.

It must be said that (despite many undrinkable, though sippable and competition-winning, horrors) there are many high-alcohol wines that are in excellent balance, where it would be difficult to argue (even by conservatives) that the alcohol level of, say, 15 percent is inherently excessive and impairs drinkability too much. Even with such successful wines, however, increasingly many winelovers (needing to drive home, perhaps, or simply wanting to stave off befuddlement) are starting to worry. And there are, in fact, far more examples where ripe flavours are accompanied by a lack of freshness and the likelihood of both staggering and headaches.

Keeping it low

A good deal of research is going into means of keeping the ripe flavours and youthfully smooth tannins in wine while losing some of the alcohol – producing new techniques in both vineyard and cellar. The easiest way of coping with the conundrum is to use technology to reduce the alcohol. Regulatory regimes in the warmer parts of the world especially are eagerly accommodating this particular element of progress – however much it might risk further damaging the (not entirely deserved) image of wine as one of the modern world’s last bit of ‘natural’ food production.

South Africa has, inevitably, followed suit. Local regulations now indicate, in the list of permitted additives and removals, that alcohol is now allowed to be be removed from wine by means of centrifuge, reverse osmosis, distillation and nano-filtration – reducing the proportion of alcohol by adding water is not permitted, as it is in California for example). (Such wines are still, theoretically, not allowed to be exported into Europe – you are at this point to imagine the worried, honest looks in the producers’ eyes….)

But what do the people who make our wine for us feel about the new tools at their disposal? A sense of liberation? Sadness that high technology is again distancing wine from, literally, its roots? Predictably, some feel one way, some the other, and some a more complicated or confused combination. As with other aspects of intervention in the still sometimes wonderful and mysterious passage of wine from vine to bottle, there is no simple answer as to where the line should be drawn.

I asked some leading local winemakers for their opinions about alcohol reduction.

Drawing the line

David Trafford of De Trafford Wines has been both praised for his fine wines and sometimes censured for their high alcohols – often well over 15 percent. He agrees that it is ‘a philosophical issue of where to draw the line between completely natural and industrial practices’. His own philosophy means that, when it comes to high-tech alcohol reduction, he ‘would be one of the last to go for such an option’.

‘It is not that I think high alcohol is a good or bad thing, but that I strive to make wine as naturally and with as little manipulation as possible. I know it sounds a bit clichéd, but the expression of place in a glass is what is so compelling about wine and sets it apart from just about every other beverage. I really don't care too much about figures (percentages or alcohol, acidity, etc) and even less about smart machinery and fancy tricks.’

Which is fine, of course, in a world that still effectively rewards the sort of wines that David’s vineyards and low-intervention winemaking practices deliver on the small, expensive scale at which he operates – but let us remember that his wines 15 years back had much lower alcohol levels than now (others measured them, and can compare!). It is rare to be able to be quite immune from the market’s demand.

Dilution

Interestingly, David Trafford agrees with Klein Constantia’s Adam Mason that adding water to wine (not allowed by the new rules, remember) is probably a more natural and less intrusive way of reducing alcohol. And vastly cheaper, as David points out!

The idea of dilution makes Adam Mason wax a little ironical too: ‘I imagine that the EU has enough of a wine lake on its hands – it would prefer to have less wine from the rest of the world (due to alcohol removal) rather than more wine (due to water addition).’ Adam is guardedly welcoming of the new legislation. Anyway, as he points out: ‘Good or bad, it was inevitable that this became legal, as the technology is so readily available.’

It should be said that Adam is not contemplating using technology (or water, for that matter) to lower high alcohols – it’s seldom a real problem in the Constantia Valley, anyway. But he is honest in seeing the useful potential of machinery for this purpose (as for other remedial actions, such as removal of excess volatile acidity, for example). He stresses, though, that ‘first prize will always be selecting the correct picking day’.

Furthermore, technology should not be an automatic, easy way out, or surreptitiously used:

‘I am grateful that the technology is available for the sake of remedial amelioration, but have a problem when it is applied annually to compensate for poor vineyard sites in order to achieve a commercial style – especially when the wines are marketed as traditionally handcrafted, natural products.’

As someone committed to growing rather than manufacturing wines, he is also a little uncertain ‘as to whether using these techniques erases the contribution of terroir’. (‘I am a believer you see!’, he adds.)

Working in the vineyards

It is unlikely that any wine-loving winemaker (of whom there are fortunately quite a large number) would actually prefer to have to resort to additions and subtractions in the cellar, whether of high or low technological order. Getting the grapes right must be the ultimate goal – though seldom perfectly achieved. Linley Schultz, the ultimate boss of winemaking for the vast Distell range of wines, points out that there has been plenty of work in their vineyards to deal with the growing problem of high alcohols: ‘We have been having good success using canopy management to improve the proportion of ripe fruit characters in our wines at acceptable levels of sugar concentration.’

He also indicates another alternative to alcohol adjustment: the development of yeast strains which have a lower conversion ratio of sugar to alcohol than is desired in, say, the cooler parts of Europe where it precisely the opposite problem – lower ripeness – that exercises winemakers’ minds, and they raise alcohol levels by adding sugar to the fermenting must (for David Trafford a ‘frightfully unnatural and fraudulent activity’).

Linley is certainly not opposed, however, to mechanical means of adjustment, and welcomes the new legislation which allows local winemakers to do what many of their foreign competitors have been able to do for years. For him – and he surely speaks for many winemakers and a huge segment of winedrinkers – the bottom line is that ‘it improves the quality of the wine. Otherwise why would you do it when it costs money?’  In this way it is, quite simply, ‘a good thing’.

As to whether Distell will be using the new possibilities allowed, he has doubts – though he doesn’t rule it out. ‘It really gets back to cost versus benefit debate’, he says, pointing out the cost of the processing would not be viable for those wines that are already having trouble competing in the cutthroat business of filling the lower shelves of supermarkets.

What about soul?

There’s not necessary a lot of soul to be found on those supermarket shelves. It’s an emotive concept invoked by Philip Jonker, fourth-generation caretaker of traditions at the family estate of Weltevrede. Of the winemakers whose opinions I asked for, his were perhaps the most forthright: ‘conservative’ and ‘traditionalist’, as he proudly says. ‘I like the idea of wine being made more or less as it has been done over thousands of years. Wine is a natural product.’ Well, yes; I didn’t get Philip’s opinion about artificially irrigating and fertilising vineyards, or acidifying wines, but he is implacable about alcohol dilution (and no doubt speaks for many of the winelovers who wouldn’t simply go along with Linley Schultz):

‘If someone uses water to dilute the alcohol level, he or she is not only wrong, but also diluting flavour, tannins, glycerol, the works, and the wine will lose its texture and structure. But wherever human nature is in control you will find self centred actions, a lack of integrity and money calling the shots.’

Philip goes back to the ideal of solving the problem by work with the vines:

‘If we have to reach lower alcohol levels we have to start at the point of terroir and vineyard management to get to the required balance. When we get to the point where we blame global warming, sow vines anywhere because money talks, add water or churn the alcohol out in whichever way, then we have lost the soul of winemaking.… Then the winery becomes a factory.'

The great divide

What is particularly interesting about Philip Jonker’s position is its straightforwardness – as with Linley Schultz’s. But whereas the latter welcomes techniques that improve the ‘quality’ of wine, Jonker doesn’t seem to show respect for any aspect of the ‘factory’ side of winemaking, at any level (or perhaps it’s just a lack of personal interest in a different approach).

David Trafford, though, operates with a distinction that is becoming harder to avoid these days, between ‘fine wine’ and ‘commodity wine’ – the former ‘being that which is good enough to show some individuality and at least an attempt to express a sense of place’.  For Adam Mason too, ‘fine wine’ is a product relying on ‘special sites, sound viticulture and sound winemaking techniques, and the less we fiddle with wines, the greater the greatness of those truly special wines’. Neither winemaker, however, express contempt for the ‘factory’ side of things.

Indeed, David Trafford accepts technology being used to construct ‘commodity wine’. ‘It is obviously in this latter category that alcohol reduction techniques will be most useful’, he says – ‘and I personally don't have a problem with it’.

Yet in California, at least, it seems to be precisely wines of the quality and style made by David Trafford that use (and can afford to use, Linley Schultz would point out) high-tech interventions for alcohol reduction. And precisely in response to the demands of the (tiny but very lucrative) market they are, if not necessarily designed for, then at least serving.

A radical split between two types of wine might seem inevitable, even established, but it is not always clear where the line dividing the two is to be drawn. Using expensive machinery to reduce alcohol does not make things any easier or more difficult than does, say, chaptalisation or enrichment via reverse osmosis in some fine cool-climate wines, or acidification in different conditions.

COMMENT

From wine-writer Jean-Pierre Rossouw:
A good article;  the (optimistic?) belief in the natural quality of wine is put under immense pressure by these new and legal winemaking practices – and it would be tricky to argue its natural status at all in modern winemaking. I for one would rather be informed about how my wine is made, rather than have to be subjected to more and more flowery attempts to buttress wine's 'pure and natural' perception. As for terroir, let those that preach it be more vigilant about all the processes, from the soil up.

From Andras Salamon:
At the recent Institute of Masters of Wine Symposium, arch dealcoholisation proponent Clark Smith [of the sometimes controversial Vinovations company, which does a lot of reverse osmosis work] stated that 45% of California North Coast wine undergoes some form of alcohol adjustment. Last year, a prominent Californian grower stated 'anybody getting sugars over 26.5 Brix is adding water', while the *average* ripeness at harvest in Napa has been hovering around 25.5 Brix for the past several seasons! So it seems that it isn't just the top level wines that are tweaked...

Response from Tim James:

Thanks Andras for these illuminating statistics. I did suggest that it is the expensive techniques that are perhaps used for just top-level wines. I think the services of Vinnovation come reasonably expensive, for example. Presumably most Californian alcohol adjusters are 'rehydrating' their wines....

By the way, Andras is writing his Cape Wine Masters dissertation on techniques of alcohol reduction - so we hope to have a link to that at some stage. Meanwhile, if anyone is interested in some journalistic articles on the technical side of things, and related issues, I can point them to a few interesting ones on the open-access part of Jancis Robinson's ever-informative website:

• New techniques to make wines less alcoholic
• High alcohol wines - different countries' responses
• Sweet spots and biodynamism - fighting alcohol
• Adding water to wine

From Clive Sindelman
Thanks for that fascinating Jancis R article on biodynamism and alcohol levels. That Monsieur Gauby  can move from 15% to 12% alc levels whilst improving the aesthetics of his wine is a seminal lesson for all SA winemakers.

From Francois Haasbroek of Waterford Estate:

As a young winemaker, I have always been subjected to technology, and you can't stop it from happening. But I am a firm believer in wine as a ‘living’ product and not a constructed one. The issue of alcohol removal is not what intigues me here. It is accepted to add acid, remove VA, even Brettanomyces can be treated now, add cultured yeasts, malolactic bacteria, enzymes, settling agents, fining agents etc etc.

The removal of alcohol or addition of water means one thing: you got it wrong in the vineyards.  

I attended a seminar presented by Vinlab about four years ago. One of the speakers was the creator of Superfood from California (I cannot recall her name). She made a statement then, that already got me going: ‘Adding water in the cellar ( California ) is totally natural and correct, you are only replacing a substance that was there to start with.’

I cannot disagree more with that statement. Yes, the water you are replacing was there at certain time. But grapes are like any other living creature – one thing changes and everything else changes with it, it forms a new balance or quilibrium. You might not like that new balance, hence you should have manipulated the vineyard before you reached that point.

Adjusting it in the cellar is a worst-case scenario, and like it or not it will show somewhere along the line in that wine. The same goes for acid adjustments; we are making wine in South Africa, blessed and cursed with heat. Constructing a wine that has a 14% alc, 3,2 pH, full malolactic fermentation and yet you manage to finish with a 7-7,5g/l acid - makes alarm bells goes off in my head!

Lastly, the argument has been raised that dropping the alcohol and not having it so pronounced will enhance the wine’s ability to show it's sense of place. Rubbish! If a wine gets to the point where the alcohol is tasted as a seperate entity (and you can't put a exact level on this - David Trafford’s wines are a perfect example of a wine where 15% alcohol is in perfect balance); if tyou get to that point then you are working with totally overripe fruit, and by that point you will be lucky if you can tell if you are drinking a merlot or a cabernet. Sense of place or terroir has long since left the building.

As with any other product there is a market for the constructed and a place for the ‘more natural’. It is crucial for those of us that want to produce wines of distinction and distinct wines, to hold true to what you believe in.