Lou Wine Shop

This week’s tasting focuses on low-alcohol wine. Doesn’t that feel contradictory, as isn’t the main purpose of drinking a glass of wine the effect of ethanol on our collective brains? Well, yes, but also, no. To be sure, for us who drink wine, the neurochemical appeal of ethanol, the main product of grape fermentation—chilling out, opening ourselves to others, to being here, now, in the moment, slowing the fuck down—is obvious and not to be slept on. Of course, too much of a good thing is not too good, as I can attest to as well as anyone, but shouldn’t we, in moderation, look for higher alcohol wines, if indeed our main interest in drinking wine is to get our buzz on? Well, if your only interest in drinking wine is to get buzzed, I can suggest many less expensive and more expedient ways of doing so, e.g., buy a cheap bottle of vodka from Trader Joe’s and make a vodka soda. But of course, we don’t drink wine merely to get buzzed. We drink wine, in part, for the places you’ll go: literal places, sitting under an umbrella in a plaza after a day of schlepping, or a friendly wine bar in a foreign city, or at a friend’s dinner table, but also metaphorical places, where the wine takes you, both places of days long gone, but also places here and now. And part of what we taste in wine is both the ethanol, most apparent in higher alcohol wines, which can feel warm or inert in our mouths, but also, oddly sweet (low doses of ethanol can taste strangely sweet). Ethanol transforms plain water and motivates and regulates all the other flavors and aromas in wine. Yet, when there is a bit too much of it, it can turn a potentially refreshing beverage into a blaring, organoleptic Klaxon horn that pounds the table and demands your undivided attention; something thick, impenetrable, and quite the opposite of what you might want on a too-warm summer evening. The great French wine scientist, Emile Peynaud, argued that good wine is all about balance, and feared that low-alcohol wines risk being “small, weak…,” whereas higher-alcohol wines are “vigorous,” “heady,” and sometimes “fierce.” I disagree with Peynaud here and choose not to comment in writing on the subtext of these adjectives, so tonight I’ll let wines speak for themselves, and present a flight of wines with lower ABV that are neither small nor weak.

We’re starting with a bone-dry, minerality-driven pét-nat made from the darling of white Penedès grape varieties, xarel·lo. Then, a still white blend of xarel·lo and another Catalan variety, macabeo. To follow, two additional Penedès wines from Bodega Clandestina: one, another xarel·lo-based wine, but given a complex fermentation in which the grapes are harvested at various levels of ripeness, with the final, ripest harvest given a short-ish maceration of three weeks; the other, a light, juicy take on the Catalan red variety, sumoll. To finish, a light, alpine-infused red not from the northeast of Spain, but from the Dolomite Mountains in Italy’s northeast, a schiava from schiava specialist Martin Gojer.