Where's The Happy Medium?

Filed in archive Wine News on July 20, 2007

This week, the U.K. newspaper the Telegraph has been toasting the world of wine with a number of great articles. Thursday's article on the increasing alcohol content was particularly interesting. It gave a couple explanations as to why this might be happening.

From The Telegraph:

"Levels of alcohol have certainly increased during the 40 or so years I have been in the wine trade," says John avery MW (Master of Wine), chairman of Averys Wine Merchants - our partners in Telegraph Wines.

"The first wines to show symptoms were Californian chardonnays and, later, Australian ones. The alcohol levels frequently exceeded 14 to 14.5 per cent, which was very high. People seemed to ignore the fact that levels in white Burgundies were also creeping up."

Some blame global warming - although Avery believes there's a simpler answer. "The more powerful and concentrated red wines seemed to please wine critics and competition judges, especially in the US," he says. "The resulting high scores encouraged producers to go for higher alcohol levels."

Earlier this week I pointed out a new wine that's selling point is low alcohol content. And we've been reading so much about high alcohol wines (so few people seem happy with those). I have to wonder how much longer this high-alcohol trend will continue. I don't necessarily have a problem with drinking a wine that is 15% alcohol if it is well-made. But as this article points out, many of these wines seem to have been rushed. I'm not looking for a low-alcohol wine, either, because again unless it is well made (and of course, some wines are naturally lower in alcohol) quality will suffer. (I can't help but think of decaffeinated coffee compared to regular coffee). If only there were a magic "sweet spot" that would make everyone happy.