I must taste 100 wines in a week through my job as Wine Director at Redd Restaurant in Yountville. Many are amazing examples, full of beautiful aromatics, rich, bright fruit, and long length. However, it is a balance of all elements that make for a truly memorable, outstanding wine. This is where the problem occurs, and all too often I taste initially exciting wines that are ruined by overwhelming alcohol and heat in the finish. For many tasters...

the reaction is to lift the bottle and look at the alcohol content on the label, but this can be misleading. Wineries have the legal option to estimate on the low side of actual measured alcohol content, within 1.0% on a wine over 14% alcohol. This means that a wine that reads 14.5% alcohol can actually be up to 15.5%, and even more disturbing, that Pinot Noir or Chardonnay that may seem high at 14.9% are bordering on fortified-like alcohol content of nearly 16%.

Beyond this labeling leniency, the real question revolves around why alcohol content of California wines has skyrocketed in the last decade. Most winemakers I ask blame Mother Nature and the abundance of beautiful, warm growing days here, and the tendency to get such naturally high sugars. So did it get that hotter in just the last 10 years? And although there is tangible and dramatic evidence of the effects of global warming, is it just coincidence that these newly concentrated, over-ripe, nearly sweet, high alcohol newcomers are receiving the close to perfect scores from the two self appointed, grand poobahs of wine reviewing. It is also quite amazing to watch how wineries will hire the latest new cult name in winemaking to change the previous style of an established wine and amplify elements including ripeness, sweetness, concentration and extraction in hopes of extracting a few more points from the reviewers.

I believe that many of the changes are occurring in the stressing of the vines. I recall walking in a famous Oakville vineyard and observing the condition of the vines that reminded me of many a plant left on a porch after being abandoned due to lack of time to care for it. I saw thin canopies of leaves allowing the sun to blast through and prematurely raisin the fruit. The soil was dried and cracked because irrigation was not allowed after verasion to intensify fruit character. Sadly, each shoot was only allowed to have one cluster of grapes, with the thinking that all the energy would be directed in to ripening and concentrating the fruit. The vines under this kind of stress don't remain healthy for very long under these conditions, but the scores they receive are high and the bottles command big dollars. Even this year, I still saw grape bins on trucks rolling down Highway 29 well into mid-November, after being left to hang on the vines until the sugar content could barely get much higher.

That is really the reason I get so excited to taste a 1974 Stags Leap Cabernet, or a 1985 Heitz Martha's Vineyard. Those wines have aged so well, and are in nearly perfect balance. Even today, the Cabernet from Corison and Paradigm Wineries are amazing. They show amazing structure and balance, full of dark fruit, and appropriate tannins. More importantly you would never single out alcohol in the finish, which is exactly the reason they are such wonderful wines to drink with food.