The physiological ripeness of the fruit is one thing. And it was addressed in my last little essay. Whether or not perfectly ripe fruit left to its own devices will make a well balanced and well-structured wine is quite another. In my experience with red wines, it’s rarely the case.
Let’s use the example of this year’s Pinot Noir. It was exemplary in terms of ripeness, flavor, and condition. I only rarely encounter such perfect fruit. I’ve been soaking that fruit in the bin now for 48 hours and mixing it, so can now analyze it with confidence that the sample reflects the reality of its composition. I took the sample to an accredited lab so the results would be robust. I won’t delve into the detail of every aspect of the 11 parameters delivered but will concentrate on one essential structural element, alcohol, to illustrate my point.
If I were making my decision based solely on sensory perception I would have concluded that the potential alcohol was going to be on the low side. This fruit is so exceptionally fresh in flavor that the apparent sweetness in the mouth is low. I already knew that not to be true as I’d sampled the vineyard and used an instrument called a refractometer to assess the brix - a measure of density that correlates roughly with sugar. That density measure at the vineyard was 25.0 brix. The vineyard management itself had corroborated with a sample the same day at 24.9 brix. On the day of harvest the winery measured 25.9 brix. The brix measured after the two-day cold soak was 26.6. All of this made sense to me from a technical standpoint as there was a small percentage of soft and raisinned berries that would cause brix to increase as they soaked up.
But none of this brix data is really useful in terms of decision making as it doesn’t correlate with sugar specifically enough to estimate what your final alcohol is going to be. Fortunately, analysis of the sugars themselves, glucose and fructose are available and with actual sugar data an accurate alcohol estimate is possible. The glu/fru as it’s called was 273 for this juice. Using the average conversion the potential alcohol of this wine is 16.25% - holy cow! That would be massively high if left unadjusted. The resulting wine would be hot and harsh!
I will adjust this potential alcohol downwards by 10-12%. This is easily accomplished by a water addition. We used to call these Jesus units when I was a brash young gun. Blasphemously based, of course, on the miracle at Cana. This adjustment will shift the acid/salt balance a little and dilute nutrients etc. so other fine tunings will accompany the lowering of the sugar, but we don’t need to get any further down technical rabbit holes today.
