These are tricky times for winemakers. Used to be every few years the weather was too cool and grapes didn’t get ripe. Now the weather in many parts of the world is almost too good. Year after year, the sun shines on and on, and grapes push the outer limits of ripeness. The riper grapes get, the more sugar they contain, and too much sugar at harvest means one of two things: a sweet wine, or a wine high in alcohol. Europeans used to be happy to get 11 percent or 12 percent alcohol; now, even in cooler climates, it’s not unusual to find it topping 13 or even 14 percent. Depending on the grape and how it’s fermented, high-alcohol wines can taste disagreeably “hot,” throwing the whole flavor profile off balance and making them less agreeable with food.
In warmer California and downright hot Washington, it’s becoming difficult to find a red wine that doesn’t top 14 percent, and winemakers need a lot of ingenuity to keep them from tasting as strong as port. Recently, we’ve heard about high-tech ways of getting around the problem, most notably by employing a “spinning cone” that can bleed off excess alcohol (or water or unwanted volatile compounds—these gadgets are clever).
But there’s a simpler, time-honored way of dealing with too much ethanol in your wine barrel—stick a garden hose in and top it up with H20. The grand old man of fine California wine, Andre Tchelistcheff, used to call such wine “Chateau le Pompe,” and he wasn’t above producing it himself. There’s no law saying you can’t water your wine, or that you have to disclose the practice if you do. And with U.S. wine companies lobbying the European Union to raise the percentage of water permissible for export from 3 to 10, it’s clear the practice is growing. Not that Europeans are angels of purity. French winemakers can legally get away with mixing in not only water but also acid, oak chips, tannin powder, and other flavor changers.
All of this might be less offensive if it wasn’t all the rage these days for winemakers and marketers to profess an almost mystical belief in letting wine “speak for itself,” to let it express “the spirit of a place.” And just this week, news broke that a Japanese chemical engineer has patented a gadget that purportedly can turn young coarse wine into something tasting like it’s matured a few years in bottle, merely by zapping it between platinum electrodes in an ion exchanger. This is probably so much bushwah (though reported by the London Times), but Dr. Hiroshi Tanaka has got the Mondavi winery in California interested enough to ask to be on his mailing list.
If it turns out to work, do you think they’ll tell us when a wine’s been Tanakafied? Don’t count on it.
