Frankenvines' legacy

Published July 25, 2007 at midnight

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Visit a winery, and you'll see tanks and barrels, trellises and even the bottling line. But one thing they won't show you is a spinning cone.

I think of this, this afternoon, as I return from a run, dehydrated and slippery with sweat. After gulping water, I search for wine. German Riesling would be nice, at 7 percent or 8 percent alcohol. But all I find are the roofies of the wine world, Australian chardonnay at 14.5 percent and Lodi zinfandel at 16 and counting.

In 1971, the average Napa Valley wine had 12.5 percent alcohol. Today 14.8 percent is the norm. What's going on?

Once upon a time, hot, dry New World climates allowed them to pick riper grapes. Sensing competition, the Old World followed suit, aided by new technology. Then, global warming heated up the world's vineyards, resulting in even lusher, stronger wine.

There was also the numbers game: Alcohol is a great carrier of aroma, flavor and body. When a critic sits down to 40 wines, the bold and brash will outshout the subtle and elegant every time. This led producers to make blockbusters to garner higher ratings.

But super-high-test wine is often sweet, over-rich and pruney. It loses the balance and freshness that washes down food. Europeans scoff at these wines, calling them obvious, unsophisticated fruit bombs.

Actually, many American wineries would like to make leaner wine, especially considering anything over 14 percent is taxed at a higher rate. But they're up against a monster they can't control, a force put into action, now impossible to stop: Frankenvines.

Back in the 1870s, an American root louse, phylloxera, hitched a ride across the Atlantic and gobbled its way, Pac-Man-like, through the vineyards of Europe. It nearly wiped them out, until someone realized that you could make European vinifera vines immune by grafting them onto American rootstock. That's what most of the world did for over a century. But louses evolve, and another outbreak in the 1990s had California scrambling to uproot and replant with the newest resistant stock.

Normally, grape flavors and sugars develop together. But something weird happened with the Frankenvines of the 1990s. Somehow, sugar ripeness got uncoupled from flavor ripeness. This resulted in grapes that were super-sweet long before they developed much flavor. Since sugar turns into alcohol, a flavorful wine meant extra booze.

There's a solution, but it's kept so underground the Freemasons will probably show their initiation on YouTube before it's revealed: de-alcing, or removing alcohol. Common methods include reverse osmosis and the spinning cone, which uses vacuums and centrifugal force to separate alcohol from essence.

And though the obvious solution, dilution, is illegal, many wineries are startlingly aggressive about washing up and hosing down their tanks.

Why the secrecy? To jibe with the fantasies of a gullible public and sensationalist press. Wine, you see, is meant to be a natural product of the earth. A good winemaker is but a shepherd, merely guiding gently from the first bud, through spontaneous fermentation until the moment the stuff hops into a bottle and labels itself.

The mystique is so strong that many European languages don't even have a word for winemaker. That which I cannot name does not exist.

The truth is that to make wine you must select land, prepare soil, choose rootstock, sort through clones, erect trellising systems, prune, fertilize, chase away pests . . . and that's just in the vineyard. The "interference" continues in the winery.

There's also the romantic notion of "terroir," the unique thumbprint of soil, weather and other variables on a finished wine. Surely, putting wines through big, computerized machines, fraught with their insensate modernity, will strip every last trace of good, honest terroir!

Actually, users of these atrocities insist that removing a little alcohol allows terroir to shine through loud and clear. The way I see it, one person's pure is often another's meddling. There's nothing inherently evil about technology, and wine has never made itself. If I can find a bottle with full flavor and modest buzz that quenches my thirst to boot, I don't care if it went through a nuclear reactor. And if it did, who knows - it might make me run faster.

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Jester@corkjester.com