handtomouth

Few wine lovers profess to loving wines for their high alcohol. As a beverage that has for centuries ended in the bottle at between 10 and 13 percent alcohol, the power and richness that higher levels of alcohol bring to wine is a new phenomenon. At the same time, wine is not perceived as a highly alcoholic drink, more as an accompaniment to food than an alcohol conveyor.

But this perception is under revision, as riper grapes and more efficient yeasts convert more sugar into more alcohol, presenting us with wines that habitually swell with fourteen percent alcohol and often even more – with shiraz and viognier, two fashionable varieties, leading the way in ultra-ripeness.

Countering wines’ increasingly persuasive narcotic quality is our desire to drive home safely as well as to enjoy more than a glass of the stuff, for high alcohols can make the drink fat and unctuous and increasingly less refreshing to drink. This is not a local problem either, efficiencies in wine-making have also turned Australian, American and even French wines into more blurry glassfuls.

The result is that many producers profess that there is more and more pressure on them to find ways to rein alcohols in. Local commentators suggest that one solution lies in more aware viticultural practises, even extreme ideas like twisting the grape bunch stems to shut the uptake of sugar down at a certain point, before the potential alcohol is too high.

On the other hand, we do live in a very warm viticultural area, and with the newer clone vines, higher potential alcohols are the norm. More than one winemaker accepts that this is reality. Perhaps there is room for alcohol reduction by using yeasts that covert the sugars less efficiently, but this may mean genetic modification.

And genetic modification is only one of the jewels in Pandora’s Box when talking alcohol reduction. Other wine regions of the world allow the winery to add water and thereby dilute the alcohol. Winemakers claim you can taste this. In the Cape, some wineries use reverse osmosis machines to remove alcohol as well as extract. The manipulations begin, and wine moves further and further away from an unadulterated natural product.

We are not far from a scenario where grapes can be reduced to their flavour essence, after which a particular level of alcohol and extract, or weight, can be dialled in. To some extent this is already happening. What I would fight for is that the label tells us consumers how the wine is made – allowing us to hold onto our romantic notions about natural wine; or to choose a fruit concoction if the price is right.