What's wrong about a "warm finish" on red wine?

[JohnP]

I have also had 17% alc wines that were awesomely structured powerful and delicious, with no hint of alc on the nose or palate.

Seriously, please give me an example. I have enjoyed many 17% alc wines but I have never been able to say in my tasting note that it had no hint of alcohol on the nose or palate. This would also help to compare palate sensitivities to alcohol.

Kind regards,
Adair[/quote]

Wild Duck Creek Duck Muck 2004 - I believe it was around 17.5%, no hint!

[Red Bigot]

Personally I think there is far too much hand wringing about temperature, taste and "conditioning". Certainly we should all be drinking wines at the right temperature, and of course people have different tastes and there are people who do and don't drinks spirits. But surely this discussion should revolve around an objective analysis of wines and their quality.

If we reduce the discussion to the level of what people are conditioned to, or their likes and dislikes, then we may as well throw wines criticism out the window and allow wine like Little Penguin its place in the sun as a great wine to those who love it. However, I am assuming that most people in this forum are interested in what makes a good quality wine and the standards by which wine professionals/wine enthusiasts judge them.

Objectivity in wine analysis doesn't go far beyond the basics, there ARE too many subjective, personal preferences, environmental factors and (yes) conditioning at play. That's why you get results like the Geoff Kelly report discussed in another thread and why the correlation of the same wines winning similar medals in different wine shows could be as low as 30% and different (competent) reviewers arrive at vastly different conclusions about the same wine and (locally accepted) Aus wines are regularly trashed in some overseas publications.

I also think we can agree that there is such a thing as too much oak but that each person may have a different response to that level of oak. However we should agree that too much oak in a wine (keeping in mind it's style and evolution) is a flaw. Similarly, too much alcohol in the finish is also a flaw though tolerance levels may differ.

Exactly, it's a personal, subjective assesmment of objective criteria.

It is disingenuous to talk about spirits and "conditioning". Spirits are a different drink, just as beer is a different drink. Would anyone accept a whisky drinker suggesting that beer is dilute because it has less alcohol? In the same way I think it is silly to say that a Scotch drinker is used to high alcohol levels and therefore may not be able to discern a hot wine. Much as I like single malts at 40%+ a/v, I do occasionally find that a port at 20% a/v can be hot. The whole Scotch/Brandy thing is a red herring.

RB, I quite agree with you about warmth in a wine, however to me it has a different meaning. I associate "warm" as a quality I find in wines with richness and complexity. I tend to use the descriptor "warm" not as an alcohol sensation but rather as part of a rich, ripe, warming quality in an older mature wine.

I'm not suggesting "not be able to discern", more "not regard it as unpleasant or a fault". I'll run a Poll shortly to see what other people think.

I tend to use warm in the same way as you describe, but I also suspect that as fruit and tannins mellow and soften, the alcohol is there, mostly unchanged and becomes a little more apparent as desirable warmth in the absence of the sharper youthful flavours.

Drinking a wine at a "cool" 16-18 degrees, if you detect heat or warmth as a distinct, separate sensation then my guess is the wine can be described as hot, a little or a lot depending on the degree to which it makes itself known. If the wine is rich, fleshy, ripe and warm, all together in an integrated way, then you needn't worry about talking about alcohol levels or the "warmth" of the wine as a separate quality.

Methinks that the effort to distinguish a difference between warm and hot is perhaps an attempt to defend the the rise of so many high alcohol wines and the predictable reaction to them.

Since I raised the topic I can answer categorically that I'm not defending high alcohol wines per se, especially the soft, flabby unbalanced ones. But I do think the current fuss in the wine and popular press about high-alcohol wines has been a bit carried away in the push for moderation in alcohol consumption due to widespread abuse.

I don't think the alcohol abusers are going to seek out $30 Warrabilla reds as their drink of choice, or that the people who generally buy those sort of wines are often alcohol abusers or addicts.

As one wine producer wrote to me about this topic:
"It amuses me when I see a critic praising richness of flavour and soft mouthfeel and then saying the wine would be better if it was 1% less alcohol. They do not seem to realise that it would then have less richness and mouthfeel. You can't just dial in the numbers."

The market will decide, if politicians don't intervene, if people keep buying the wines, they will continue to be made as many areas of Australia simply produce grapes that are properly ripe at high baume levels and not before. Certainly viticultural practices can modify this to some extent, but in the words of Drew Noon:
"We never decided to make that style of wine. That's what we have to make. If you were here, you would be making them too. The fruit we've got dictates the style. You couldn't make anything else. You could make lighter wines but they would not be as good because they would not be the best expression of the site. We don't let them hang out there for the sake of it; sometimes we can't get them in fast enough.”

[Roscoe]

It is disingenuous to talk about spirits and "conditioning". Spirits are a different drink, just as beer is a different drink. Would anyone accept a whisky drinker suggesting that beer is dilute because it has less alcohol? In the same way I think it is silly to say that a Scotch drinker is used to high alcohol levels and therefore may not be able to discern a hot wine.

Mahmoud, I have assumed you do not understand the meaning of the word disingenous- if you do, I will probably take offence.
Beer is usually made within a fairly restricted range of alcohol concentrations as are spirits. Perhaps we are conditioned to accept that level of alcohol in that type of beverage. Most people find that the beer tastes different when outside this range, and may appear unbalanced because that is different to their experience. We may need to be conditioned to the different taste to find it appealing. The same may be said of spirits, and may explain why different people like their spirits served in many different ways.
I don't think anyone has said a spirits drinker may not be able discern a hot wine- I agree with RB's comment.
I also agree with RB's comments about the subjective nature of wine analysis. There is very little in the way humans assess that could really be described as objective, and I don't think wine assessment is one of them. As RB said, inter-rater reliability in wine assessment is not wonderful, even amongst people who are highly trained.

[Sean]

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[orpheus]

Sean, I think that the opposite happens; over time, as the primary fruit characteristics diminish, the alcohol becomes more prominent.

A good recent example I have tasted is the Dalwhinnie Moonambel cabernet 1993.

It was an enjoyable wine, but the alcohol was quite dominant.

I have about 6 left. I will try Chris' trick of sticking it in the fridge for fifteen minutes before I taste the next one.

QUOTE;

Mahmoud,

I don’t really disagree with much of what you say, except this perhaps because I am not sure if being a flaw is the right way to look at it.

I wonder if there is a fundamental difference between oak and alcohol??

In a young red wine, it may well seem over-oaked, but you expect over time it will soften up and not show as much oak. (Some won’t of course.)

But what happens with alcohol in high alcohol red wines? Does the effect of the alcohol become less over time?

The number itself isn’t the issue, but what it indicates about the wine, ie. later picked characters and less acid, etc. We are always being told that good wine is made in the vineyard (or something like that). So when the alc (or baume) is being decided, by when the fruit is picked, this must be deciding just about everything else about the wine as well.

While we talk about alc numbers in young red wines in terms of how it tastes or how hot it is, really it means something else as well. What it tastes like and how it has evolved in the btl will be different with say a 10 year old wine depending on whether it’s 13% alc or 16% alc.[/quote]

[Mark S]

I don't like the 'alcohol heat' sensation in wines - so rarely find a port that appeals, though I keep searching.

When I read about the Warrabilla Parolas Durif 2002 being 17.5%, I decided to try it, as an experiment, thinking it would be a definitive example of the opposite of my preferred style. I'd never heard of a non-fortified wine that strong (actually don't think I'd ever tried a durif before either).

Opened it July 2003 - shocked - while it was 'big' in every way, & certainly unlike any table wine I'd ever had, I found it most surprisingly attractive, with licorice/prune/spice/dark berry notes. I did not get any of the harsh alcohol heat that I detest. For a wine with its controversial reputation, and cellaring recommendations of 20+ years, I thought it was amazingly approachable.

Tried the same wine a couple of years later, and didn't much like it - seemed harder, ungenerous, with the tannins & alcohol poking out - clearly gone into some kind of 'hole'.

Don't know if there's any 'scientific' evidence for this, but I've found that some wines that are supposed to be cellared for decades, can, if caught in a narrow window between bottling and maybe 6 months - 1 year later, be delightfully fruity, 'ready', without any of those tough characters that the usual reviews note & that make people shy away from them. Shortly afterwards however, they do indeed seem to shut down for god knows how long.

[dave vino]

I don't like the 'alcohol heat' sensation in wines - so rarely find a port that appeals, though I keep searching.

You should try a Rutherglen Tokay. Campbell's Classic or similar.

[Mark S]

absolutely right - have had a few wonderful Morris, Seppelts, Grands or Rares - without getting that hot harsh character at all. Australia's gems.

[Mahmoud Ali]

Roscoe,

I should apologize if I offended and perhaps I may have used the term disingenuous incorrectly. What I meant (and the comment was not directed at you in particular), was that people who talk about spirits and “conditioning” should know better than to think that drinking spirits necessarily affects the ability to critically assess wines. Thus I don’t find that a friend of mine’s smoking makes him unable to discern the subtle differences in wine or that RB’s apparent chillie addiction hinders his wine appreciation. I did not mean to give the impression that you, or anyone else, were intentionally trying to mislead or dissemble.

Your comment, and RB’s, about a wine taster’s subjectivity is correct but I differ only in that whatever the differences, these tasters are probably using the same objective criteria to assess wines. So while the tasters may have a different opinion on the same wine they are not using different standards to rate the wine.

Sean, I only used oak as an example, and did not mean to suggest that oak and alcohol are related. As to whether a wine is over-oaked, too hot, tannic, acidic, or fruity , etc. etc. is a matter of critical assessment. Sure a wine will change over time but that doesn’t prevent a person from making a judgement about its qualities, flaws, longevity, etc. We must assume that the critic has taken into consideration the style and possible evolution of the wine.

While wine in bottle will change over time I don’t think that the alcohol level will diminish. Thus I agree that a wine with a high degree of alcohol may evolve differently over time but much depends on the other components in the wine. Sure a high alcohol wine may be more likely to become imbalanced over time but I don’t have any experience with old high alcohol wines, at least not until some of my wines reach maturity.

Mark S, if you want to give vintage port another chance, do think about decanting it in the morning and allowing it to breathe all day. By the time you drink it later in the evening you may find that much of the spirritiness will have dissipated.

Like you I had an experience wih a very high alcohol wine and didn’t find it hot in the least. It was a Canadian wine if you can believe it, a Quail’s Gate Reserve made from a hybrid called Marechal Foch and 16% a/v! Drank the first bottle and was glad to have a second bottle to cellar. It drank beautifully when young and only time, the ultimate arbiter, will tell if it will be good in future.

RB, the current fuss in the wine press about high alcohol wines probably has more to do with the large number of wineries producing these types of wines. If more wines with “moderate” levels of alcohol (14% a/v and less) were to appear on the market, then the preoccupation with the issue would die down. Just a hunch.

Cheers........Mahmoud

[n4sir]

A lot of what has been said already in this thread mirror my thoughts. When I refer to alcohol warmth or heat, it is done with absolutely no regard to what appears on the label although I have at times mentioned it - on reflection maybe I shouldn't do it in future, but then people will probably ask anyway (which I think is why I started in the first place).

I know I'm fairly sensitive to alcohol heat, but that said I do try and keep it in some kind of context too - I actually expect some warmth in varietals and blends like Grenache/GSM & Zinfandels and also some regions for that matter, and in those cases some warmth is not only acceptable but perfectly understandable.

I find it is completely unacceptable to me when there's a noticeably burning/hot sensation on the nose, and a minty/burning sensation on the palate, usually on the finish but it can also begin much earlier - sometimes there will be as mentioned 'dead fruit' characters, but that's not always the case (and I think an aligned but sightly different question to this thread).

The key to it all as mentioned is balance - sometimes a wine can feel warm mid-palate, but instead of getting hot and burning on the finish it disappears. The wine actually has enough balance (of fruit, tannin and acid) to balance it out, although it does leave me with a nagging question about how long that balance will last.

In contrast to one of the comments, I disagree about alcohol warmth contributing to the length of the wine (or what I personally regard as the real length of the wine). Acid, tannin and fruit definitely, but alcohol (especially on its own) definitely not - I can think of a couple of high profile wines where if you disregard the heat and look for these other factors they're remarkably short, and I can't see them magically appearing in future. Maybe that's wrong, but it's my take and I'm sticking to it.

Cheers,
Ian

[Roscoe]

No worries Mahmoud.
I was interested in your advice re. the vintage port. Ethanol is quite volatile- I wonder how much you may be lowering the alcohol content of the port if you leave it open to the air in a decanter during the course of a day. You obviously lower it to some extent, but how much and is this a significant amount? I had never really thought about it much. It probably depends on things like ambient temperature, surface area, air movement, size of the aperture etc. Can anyone hazard an educated guess? Is it possible to do this effectively with a table wine before oxidation takes over? I suspect not.

[Red Bigot]

No worries Mahmoud.
I was interested in your advice re. the vintage port. Ethanol is quite volatile- I wonder how much you may be lowering the alcohol content of the port if you leave it open to the air in a decanter during the course of a day. You obviously lower it to some extent, but how much and is this a significant amount? I had never really thought about it much. It probably depends on things like ambient temperature, surface area, air movement, size of the aperture etc. Can anyone hazard an educated guess? Is it possible to do this effectively with a table wine before oxidation takes over? I suspect not.

I don't think much of the alcohol will evaporate (at normal temperatures anyway), but the oxidative process will convert some of the ethanol to ethyl acetate etc.

I suspect some of the components of the "spiritous" effect in many wines are various other aromatic volatiles as well as ethanol per se and all these start to react with oxygen at various rates when a wine is decanted.

Vintage ports are known to lose flavour and liveliness much sooner after opening than say tawny ports and maybe muscats and tokays. The latter have had sustained slow oxidation in casks, VP doesn't have much cask time and thus seems to change more when exposed to air.

As far as I am aware, ethanol is just ethanol, there isn't any hot or more spiritous form of ethanol as opposed to a cool form of ethanol. It's the other components of distillation that result in hot fractions and mellow fractions in production of whisky and brandy etc, not the simple ethanol concentration. I'm trying to remember back to my chem lab days when we pilfered absolute ethanol for party punch, although not 100% pure it was pretty close and I don't remember it having that much of a hot sensation. Anyone else with more recent experience?

Thus a given concentration of ethanol and water should always taste the same, but when you throw in the hugely complex grape-to-wine chemical mix all the other flavour components and volotiles affect the perceived impact of the ethanol in different ways for different wines and different people.

[Red Bigot]

While wine in bottle will change over time I don’t think that the alcohol level will diminish. Thus I agree that a wine with a high degree of alcohol may evolve differently over time but much depends on the other components in the wine. Sure a high alcohol wine may be more likely to become imbalanced over time but I don’t have any experience with old high alcohol wines, at least not until some of my wines reach maturity.

RB, the current fuss in the wine press about high alcohol wines probably has more to do with the large number of wineries producing these types of wines. If more wines with “moderate” levels of alcohol (14% a/v and less) were to appear on the market, then the preoccupation with the issue would die down. Just a hunch.

Cheers........Mahmoud

Mahmoud, my oldest high alcohol wine is a Bullers Calliope Shiraz 1991. The alcohol is still there, there is a fair amount of volatile character as well, but the immense fruit it started with has mellowed and evolved so that the total result is still quite balanced and the last one I had was still excellent drinking with hearty food.

There are plenty of wines made at 14% or less (most whites and many reds) altough many "premium" and up reds seem to be 14.5% or 15%, with a very small proportion higher than that. That is simply because for some accepted styles of Australian reds, particularly Shiraz or other warmer-climate grape varieties, the desired flavour profile only comes at those sort of baume. They will continue to be made while a market exists for them.

If the wine and popular press would do a bit of serious research on the actual proportion of wines at various alcohol levels and also determine what the perpetrators of alcohol abuse are actually drinking rather than simply decrying the existence of any wine over 14.5% then we might see some rational debate.

A quick survey in a few recent vintage bins in my cellar reveals wines from 13.0 to 15.5%, with most seeming to be around 14.5% I've only fairly recently added an a/v field to my cellar database as it's never really been an item of particular interest to me, but I haven't populated it for much of my stock.

[Sean]

deleted

[griff]

No worries Mahmoud.
I was interested in your advice re. the vintage port. Ethanol is quite volatile- I wonder how much you may be lowering the alcohol content of the port if you leave it open to the air in a decanter during the course of a day. You obviously lower it to some extent, but how much and is this a significant amount? I had never really thought about it much. It probably depends on things like ambient temperature, surface area, air movement, size of the aperture etc. Can anyone hazard an educated guess? Is it possible to do this effectively with a table wine before oxidation takes over? I suspect not.

I don't think much of the alcohol will evaporate (at normal temperatures anyway), but the oxidative process will convert some of the ethanol to ethyl acetate etc.

I suspect some of the components of the "spiritous" effect in many wines are various other aromatic volatiles as well as ethanol per se and all these start to react with oxygen at various rates when a wine is decanted.

Vintage ports are known to lose flavour and liveliness much sooner after opening than say tawny ports and maybe muscats and tokays. The latter have had sustained slow oxidation in casks, VP doesn't have much cask time and thus seems to change more when exposed to air.

As far as I am aware, ethanol is just ethanol, there isn't any hot or more spiritous form of ethanol as opposed to a cool form of ethanol. It's the other components of distillation that result in hot fractions and mellow fractions in production of whisky and brandy etc, not the simple ethanol concentration. I'm trying to remember back to my chem lab days when we pilfered absolute ethanol for party punch, although not 100% pure it was pretty close and I don't remember it having that much of a hot sensation. Anyone else with more recent experience?

Thus a given concentration of ethanol and water should always taste the same, but when you throw in the hugely complex grape-to-wine chemical mix all the other flavour components and volotiles affect the perceived impact of the ethanol in different ways for different wines and different people.

It's pretty rough stuff the real absolute

Agree with the latter comment completely. Balance is key and fortifieds have more fruit/sugar to balance the alcohol as they have their fermentation stopped. I feel that some warm climate fruit can get sufficient baume grapes that to have a balanced wine you need to ferment to a higher alcohol percentage.

Its just that the latest trend is towards cool climate wines. I bet that there would be a high correlation with people that don't like higher alcohol levels and people that prefer cool climate wines.

cheers

Carl