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Postmodern Winemaking CL ARK SMITH Some Like It Hot W ine alcohol levels have certainly climbed. Elin McCoy's survey of California wine labels indi- cated a rise from 12.5% in 1971 to 14.8% on average in 2001. Australian Wine Research Insti- tute figures show the same trend for that coun- try's wines based on actual analysis: from 12.8% in 1975 to 14.5% in 2005. In the 1970s, mind you, common practice was to take advan- tage of the federal leeway of 1.5% to print multiple years' labels (with a vintage neck strap) for wines that had not even been made yet, so the label declaration was in many cases meaning- less. Today the trend is to understate high alcohols, and often 14.8% is really 15.8%. CorkWest_Aug10.qxp 7/2/10 10:36 AM Page 1 The trend toward riper fruit is even more drastic, since alcohol adjustment technologies now decrease 45% of California wines by an average of 1%, often to avoid the 50¢ tax bump at 14%. Taking on the champ What brought about this sea change in California's alcohol levels? To begin with the obvious, the kind of wine California has come to specialize in today is hardly the low-alcohol Euro-style quaffa- bles—the rhinewine, Chablis and rosés its wineries were dishing up in 1971, when our principal wine grape was Thompson Seedless. High alcohols from California aren't a new thing. The average alcohol was more than 18% in both California and Australia in 1950, when we drank almost entirely port, sherry and muscatel in tiny quantities at home and in church. The few drinkers of Euro- pean table wines didn't believe domestic stuff was worth consider- ing. Today's light off-dry table wines did not exist. Blue Nun and its ilk created in the early '60s an utterly new style of white wine. The post-WWII technological revolution supplied bubble-pointable sterile filters, inert gas and other innovations that opened for the very first time the possibility for fresh, low-alcohol 46 Wines & Vines DeCeMBeR 2011