Great question, and thanks for asking. This is a topic about which there has been way too much yellow journalism and way too little straight talk. Ever since I dropped out of MIT in 1971, I’ve been engaged in trying to understand wine and improve the making of it. In the early 1990s, visiting French friends told me that California fruit is not very ripe at normal sugar (say around 23 Brix). This is as opposed to French grapes, which get ripe at about 21 brix due to rain on the harvest and also the influence of humidity. However, at 11% alcohol, French reds taste thin and salty. Accordingly, Napoleon’s minister of Agriculture, Dr. Chaptal, legalized alcohol adjustment the addition of beet sugar to French wines (up to 20 gm/L) and that’s been a standard practice, even in First Growth Bordeaux, for 200 years.
In California, we have the opposite problem. In our dry climate, photosynthesis runs wild and we end up getting true ripeness at high sugar, leading to wines that are hot, bitter and aromatically suppressed (the aromas are soluble in the alcohol).
So 20 years ago, I stumbled on a process involving a water purification membrane called reverse osmosis which turned out to be a gentle and effective way to reduce alcohol. I patented the process and started a company called Vinovation (you can get a lot more detail at Vinovation.com) in 1992 to offer alcohol adjustment as a service. It took off, and is regularly utilized by about half the wineries in California, and between that method and a vacuum distillation process called the Spinning Cone, today about 45% of California’s wine is reduced in its alcohol, which is about the average percentage that is chaptalized in France.
True French Chablis, though low in alcohol, is made from fully ripe fruit. To get that lemon oil character, Steve Krebs and I waited until the berries were fully golden. This left us with 14.8% alcohol and a wine that was hot and bitter, with little aroma. We used alcohol adjustment to bring the level down to a “sweet spot,” a point of harmonious balance, at 12.9%. At this level, the wine has much more expressive aromatics, the energetic minerally finish is apparent, and the wine ages much longer.
The proof of all this is in the bottle. What other Napa Chardonnay is still straw green at ten years of age?
About 2000, a number of paparazzi decided to blow the whistle on this as wine manipulation. But it depends on your definition. My Random House supplies the following:
ma•nip•u•la•tion \mə-ˌnĭp-yəˈlā-shən\ n.{ens}1 : treatment or operation with or as if with the hands or by mechanical means, especially in a skillful manner.{ens}
2 : Shrewd or devious management by artful, unfair, or insidious means, especially to one’s own advantage.
I’m going to assume that readers are all in favor of wines made according to definition #1, to wit, handcrafted. Those are not grapes in that glass. As everyone knows, wine is perhaps the most manipulated of all foods, and that’s just what we want. Pick ’em, crush ’em, ferment ’em, press ’em, age ’em, bottle ’em, and nobody minds. Those aren’t, it seems, offending manipulations. Indeed, this first definition is the very essence of the artisanality for which winemakers are worshipped so lustily.
So I don’t think I am going out on a limb when I interpret the desire to avoid manipulation as somehow connected to the moralistic accusations embodied in definition #2.
In this they have a point. A better word would be “deceit.”
Winemakers use these tools but they don’t know how to talk about them. For the history of why, see my article “Some Like It Hot” http://wine.appellationamerica.com/wine-review/466/Some-Like-it-Hot.html.
The paradox right now is that those winemakers who do speak out lose sales. Nevertheless, I make it a point never to use a tool I’m not willing to be straight with my customers about, as now. I know that some people will walk away from this offer because they buy the paparazzi BS that great wine makes itself and less is more. Indeed, showing off the wine’s natural character is our work, to become invisible, as it were. But I can assure you that it takes great skill to become invisible, and benign neglect is not a recipe for excellence.
More about all this at www.winecrimes.com.
I am working on a site where winemakers can go and make full disclosure. Meantime you can count on me to fill you in about my wines.