 |
| This afternoon we are pouring four low alcohol wines. Why would we do that? Don’t we drink wine because, um, it contains alcohol? Well, of course, we do, as our ancestors did for thousands of years before our time. And yet if you examine how the ancients drank wine you see a pre-modern approach to getting crunk that feels entirely foreign to modern drinking, ruled as we are by clocks (happy hour) and our urgent scrolling through social media feeds. The ancient Greeks kept purpose-designed drinking rooms in which they reclined on purpose-designed drinking couches (klinē), and where they relaxed and slowly consumed wine flavored with herbs, spices, and honey, and diluted down with seawater—the ideal of Greek drinking was to get slowly drunk over a period of a few hours and discuss everything that mattered most to you in a relaxed, boozy context. To be sure, you can drink more of a 10.5 percent ABV wine than you can of one that is 16 percent ABV, but there is another reason to seek out and crush low ABV wines: they offer flavors and textures that their burly, bruising brothers cannot. Grapes naturally contain sugars, and during fermentation, yeasts metabolize sugars and create alcohols, primarily ethanol. The riper the grape, the more sugar in the juice (think of the difference in sweetness between a just-ripe banana and the treacly sweetness of an over-ripe banana). When you see a wine that lists 16% ABV on the label, it came from very ripe grapes, and you can predict that the wine will taste ripe, too. Received wisdom in California is that because our climate is warm here, we are destined to make ripe-tasting, high ABV wines, and for many years winemakers seem bent on making wines that tasted every riper, with ever higher ABVs. Pick earlier, received wisdom would have it, and you run the risk of making green, underripe tasting wines. But the ship is turning, even if received wisdom is not. It is still common to see zinfandel that is 15 percent ABV and often much higher, and the resulting wines often, to me, taste too ripe and Port-y, or at least prune-y. Now I love Port and prunes (not together), there is nothing wrong with Port and prunes at all, but I also do not thirst for Port and prunes every day, especially when it is warm out. Today, we are tasting a zinfandel that is not 15 % ABV, but only 10.59% ABV, and although the Oracles of Received Wisdom caution that such a wine will taste impossibly underripe and green, this wine is not, and is in fact just the sort of wine you want to put in your mouth on a warm, early autumn afternoon.
ColBel Prosecco Colfóndo Italy NV (11% ABV) |