Time is ripe for change

It’s harvest time once again, and West Coast winemakers are anxiously walking their vineyards and pondering weather forecasts as they try to predict the moment when their grapes will reach a perfect balance and be ready to pick. As Shakespeare pointed out, “ripeness is all.”

But this year, the almost existential question “What exactly is ripeness?” has become the subject of hot debate in the California wine industry. No pun intended with “hot,” either, as the word is slang for a wine with too much alcohol, a quality directly related to ripeness. As grapes ripen, sugar levels climb and acid levels fall. Yeast converts sugar into alcohol, so more sugar means stouter wines.

In the United States, especially in California, the trend toward riper grapes and more alcoholic wines has been significant. According to statistics in the July issue of Wine Business Monthly, average alcohol levels in California wine rose between 1971 and 2001 from a reasonable 12.5% to a whopping 14.8%.

With the rise in alcohol, wines, like so many other Americans, have gained weight, becoming fleshier, rounder and softer, as well as more jammy and more monolithic. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir used to be known as wines of finesse, but it’s not uncommon to see both of them in the realm of 15% alcohol today. Syrah and Zinfandel quite often push 16.

Some winemakers vehemently reject the notion that high alcohol and ripeness in today’s wines are either desirable or necessary. Jim Clendenen, owner and winemaker of Santa Maria’s Au Bon Climat, a winery specializing in Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, is one. “Hang time to allow a grapevine to come into balance is one thing,” he says. “Letting the grapes hang to achieve more flavor is a stylistic choice.” And it’s a choice that Clendenen rejects.

“Of course wines have more flavor that way, but is it a better flavor?” he asks. “It’s the question of whether you like fresh, just-picked raspberries or stewed, cooked raspberry coulis or raspberry candy. What you’re tasting in those wines is simply more sweetness and less acidity. Those wines don’t go well with food, and they don’t age.”

The notion of “hang time” -- leaving grapes on the vine to develop more flavor -- has become a bete noire for some. “ ‘Hang time’ is an expression that I despise,” says Stag’s Leap Winery winemaker Robert Brittan, “because -- forget notions of ripening and sugar -- people are simply doing it for overripe flavor and high extract.”

But ripeness is more than just sugar accumulation, which is why the question of when to pick is complicated. Winemaker Michael Havens of Napa’s Havens Wine Cellars is a Syrah and Merlot specialist who strives to make balanced, elegant wines. He’s also extremely conscious of rising alcohol levels and wrestles daily with the question of ripening. “There are several kinds of ripeness,” he explains, “and to reduce it to a single analytic factor is a big mistake.”

To understand ripeness, Havens suggests looking at each of four factors as a separate clock, ticking away as the season progresses. One clock is sugar accumulation; another is acid respiration; another is phenolic ripeness (that’s the difference between “green” tastes and soft and sweet). And, finally, explains Havens, there’s “the ‘fruit-character clock.’ It starts off on vegetative and then through herbal to spicy. Then it goes to fruity and then to jammy, which some people like, and then you get cooked, which almost no one likes.”

Clocking the outcome

One of the great questions of viticulture, then, according to Havens, is: “How do you farm your vines to get all of those clocks to chime noon at the same time?”

There’s no easy answer. Different regions face different challenges. In cooler areas such as Burgundy, they may get phenolic maturity before sugar ripeness. Poorer vintages there may have to be harvested slightly underripe due to the onset of rains. Warm places like California have the opposite problem: Hot weather accelerates the sugar clock, while the phenolic ripeness ticks along at its steady pace. Therefore grapes may reach abundant levels of sweetness (and thus high potential alcohol) with plummeting acids, while winemakers are still waiting for flavors to develop.

But do they have to wait so long? Are California’s big, ripe wines climatically dictated, or are they a stylistic fad? Do winemakers use extended hang time to achieve ripeness, or is their “ripeness” really overripeness?

“Ripeness is a judgment call. I don’t like to let things go really, really ripe,” says Seth Kunin, the Santa Barbara winemaker for Westerly Vineyards and his own label, Kunin Wines. “Too many guys are going well beyond that. I think that a function of wine is to express some terroir and style, and the more you push the envelope with extraction and ripeness the more you’re just muddying the individuality of that voice.”

Still, Kunin makes highly regarded Syrah and Viognier that would be considered on the ripe end of the spectrum.

“It is impossible to make the style of wine that’s popular today under 14% alcohol,” he says. “To make a Cab or Syrah under 23 brix [a sugar measurement equivalent to roughly 14.2% alcohol] is to have no flavor. We have ways to fix problems with sugar and acid, but we can’t add flavor. You can’t order up a bag of that.”

There remains, however, the nagging question of why flavor must come at such elevated sugars. It wasn’t always this way. In the ‘70s, the best Napa Cabernets were fully ripe and free of unpleasant “green” flavors, and still came in at about 12.5% alcohol. They have aged gracefully. Why were such wines possible then and not now?

George Vierra, a St. Helena-based winemaker who was in Napa at that time, says conditions were very different. Many vineyards were infected with leaf-roll virus, which delayed their ripening significantly.

“We struggled to get sugars back then,” Vierra says. “Nowadays we’re picking Zins and Cabs in August, when sometimes we used to wait until November. By eliminating the leaf-roll virus we probably have shortened the ripening period by 40 to 45 days.” Furthermore, when these vineyards were replanted during the ‘80s and ‘90s, most were converted to modern, European-style trellising methods, which expose the grapes to much more sun, further accelerating the sugar clock.

In the winery too, technology plays a hand. Modern yeast strains are ruthlessly efficient at converting sugar into alcohol. A typical conversion by wild or older yeasts of grapes harvested at 24 brix used to yield a wine of 13.2% alcohol. Today’s yeasts would turn the same grapes into a wine at 14.8%.

So do more advanced and efficient practices in the winery and vineyard automatically result in more alcoholic wines? Clendenen says no, and he uses a wine he crafted in the Russian River Valley under the Barham Mendelsohn label to illustrate his point. In a warm region that often produces Pinots at 14% alcohol and above, Clendenen is heartened by what he achieved through natural methods.

“The goal was to farm the vineyard organically,” he says. “We had a rootstock chosen to take away the vigor of the vine, and through canopy management we created the right amount of shade and cropped the right amount of fruit. By closely managing ripening, we brought the grapes in at perfect balance to make a wine at 13.5% alcohol. We added no water and no sugar. The wine is the exact result of the chemical composition of the grapes.”

Indeed, the Barham Mendelsohn 2001 is unlike most Russian River Valley Pinot Noir. Lighter to the point of translucence, it has high-pitched aromatics emphasizing red-berry freshness layered onto a pleasing structure. It has bright acidity, impeccable balance and graceful flavors that belie its light color and body.

Top viticulturalist Nick Dokoozlian, who recently left his teaching and research position at UC Davis to work for E.&J.; Gallo in Modesto, agrees with Clendenen that high ripeness is a conscious stylistic choice, but he takes a pragmatic view. “Winemakers are driving that, and rightfully so,” he says. “It’s what they want to make, what consumers want to drink, and is supported by perceptions of quality in the media.”

Does great equal big?

“Bigness and obviousness have become the measure of greatness because of a couple of palates,” says Clendenen. “We’ve been painted into a corner by the monolithic aspect of wine criticism, where the dictated style has been one to win blind tastings and not what best accompanies what you’re having for dinner.”

And thus the question of ripeness becomes a referendum on how we drink wine today. Is wine, as tradition has it, something to accompany food -- or is it akin to a cocktail, to be sipped before a meal? Leaner, higher-acid wines certainly work better with food than rich, low-acid wines, which can wow the palate when tasted solo but fall flat at the table. Perhaps the pendulum is beginning to swing back to more restrained styles emphasizing balance and subtlety, wines that can be intense but not over the top.

Wells Guthrie, owner-winemaker of Copain winery in Sonoma, has changed his approach with the 2003 vintage. “I thought some of my first wines were just too ripe,” he says, referring especially to his 2001 and 2002 vintages of Pinot Noir. “Tasting them now, they seem a little hot to me, with some jammy flavors.” Today Guthrie uses wild yeasts to get lower conversion rates and has recently dropped two vineyard sites because they were too warm.

Winemaker Tony Soter of Sonoma’s Etude winery says that to retard ripening he’s increased the canopy on some of his vineyards to shade the grapes, rather than exposing them to more sun, which has been the trend. And newer wineries are pushing into cooler sites, as is evident on the Sonoma coast -- where wineries such as Peay Vineyards and Fort Ross Vineyards produce everything from Pinot Noir to Syrah -- or in the Santa Rita Hills, where Cold Heaven Cellars produces Viogniers and Syrahs that offer new, lower-alcohol expressions of ripeness.

But even so, don’t expect these hang-time arguments to be going away any time soon.

As viticulturalist Dokoozlian puts it, “How far is ripe, and when is too ripe? A lot of this determination is subjective. And when human subjectivity comes into play, there will always be arguments. From a strictly scientific standpoint, I don’t see any technical way around this question until we have the tools that accurately measure the factors of ripeness. But that’s the holy grail of viticulture, and right now we’re not even close.”