Just before Christmas I received an e-mail with the subject line, "Alcohol Creep." I immediately thought it must be hate mail, or at least from someone I'd inadvertently wronged and who now wanted to impeach my sober character. It turned out to be from a reader bemoaning the recent tendency for levels of alcohol in wine to creep ever higher.
"I began tasting wine semi-seriously back in early 1970s," he wrote. "Red Bordeaux wines averaged around 12-per-cent alcohol. My appreciation of wine has continued but, alas, long since peaked. Somewhere along the way I must have fallen into a black hole (or something) because the alcohol content is now around 13.5 to 14 per cent. Is this necessary? Is it desirable? Is there a conspiracy driven by profit motive for this? Or, I wonder, does global warming have a bearing on rising sugar content in grapes and therefore higher alcohol?"
There are some good questions here. It's certainly true that alcohol levels in the wines we drink have drifted up over the last decade. In part it's because we drink more wines from warm-climate regions in Chile, Australia, California, South Africa, and the like. Grapes from warm regions generally have higher sugar content and the wines they make have a higher potential alcohol level.
It's rare to find New World wines under 13-per-cent alcohol, 13.5 per cent is very common (see today's reviews), and 14 and 14.5 per cent are certainly not rare. Is it deliberate? Yes, it is, in many cases, because there's a real market for blockbuster wines that are dark, dark red (almost black), full of intense fruit flavours, and high in alcohol, which not only gives them more punch but adds to the texture and flavour of the wine. It's a style, and you either like it or you don't. (Or you like it from time to time.)
I tasted a Zinfandel in Paso Robles (California) a year or two ago that had a declared 16.9-per-cent alcohol content, and it was the best Zinfandel I've ever tasted -- smooth, rich, concentrated, certainly Port-like. But the alcohol didn't jump out and bite, as it can often do when it goes over 14 per cent. It showed that if high alcohol is handled well by the winemaker, it's not a problem from the sensory point of view.
But you do have to watch it if you're monitoring your intake -- for health reasons or for driving, for instance.
To help consumers do that, Australian bottles often carry information on the number of "standard drinks" in each bottle. A "standard drink" is defined as any drink with 10 grams of pure alcohol, equal to 100 mL (about three ounces, a very small glass) of 12-per-cent wine, 30 mL, or 60 mL (two ounces) of fortified wine at 20-per-cent alcohol. The higher the alcohol, the smaller the volume needed to reach your 10 grams of alcohol, so the more "standard drinks" per bottle.
It's definitely worth noting the alcohol content in what you drink, and it's always given in reviews here.