Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/62522
WINEMAKING By Napoleon's time, vignerons in Burgundy and Bordeaux be- gan boosting their modest Brix levels with beet sugar to about 13% alcohol potential to improve balance. In France, you pick on flavor and color, then fix the Brix. California's dry harvest weather seldom encumbers Brix, and our standard practice until the '90s was to pick our Chardonnays and serious reds at 23.5° Brix. Nobody really picked on flavor and color, and the possibilities of enhanced ripeness were largely unex- plored, with the exception of a few late-harvest Zinfandels, often as not stuck fermentations with residual sugar. So we didn't have any notion that at 23.5%, our grapes were often not really ripe. In the early '90s, Conetech and my own company, Vinovation, introduced technologies for dealcing wine. Suddenly everybody could explore true ripeness and then readjust their alcohols to normal levels, taking advantage of improved yeast strains that made stuck fermentations less likely. California soon discovered that an extra week or two on the vine produced rich, "dark fruit" aromas and concentrated color and tannins at 25° Brix or so. Now for the bad news: These massive, vigorous young wines misbehaved badly. These were big wines prone to aggressive, grip- py tannins and closed-up, stinky aromatics that masked fruit and underlined green, veggie smells. Our wines were bigger, richer and truer, but they tasted terrible. French-trained locals like Bernard Portêt and Christian Mouiex were quite familiar with these behaviors and knew them as marks of greatness. Reductive energy is strongest in the best wines, and the traditional cure has always been to age them. But the new wave of red consumers didn't recognize these virtues. And our winemakers did not exit academic institutions trained in the suite of postmodern élevage tools they need to manage properly ripe fruit in the cellar. Heart-smart reds Throughout the '80s white wines led the market and little red wine was consumed. That all changed Nov. 17, 1991, when CBS tele- vised "The French Paradox," which projected a strong likelihood that red wine prevented heart disease. Hey, worth a try! Red wine sales increased 39% overnight. The swing to reds was cemented in 1995, when 60 Minutes reported a Copenhagen study that es- timated optimum healthy consumption at three to five glasses of red wine per day. Trouble was, trend-following novices couldn't stomach the kind of wines that won at Paris. But the market that emerged as a result of the French Paradox wanted big, drinkable wines now! They wanted rich, yummy reds with loads of heart-smart bioflavonoids and luscious fruit. Today, please. Cabernet of normal ripeness is a bit on the chewy side for even the most health-motivated wine initiate. Do you have something a Wines & Vines DeCeMBeR 2011 49