"jcoulter" > wrote in message
...
> Why have wine drinkers suddenly become so wary of a component as
> refreshing as acidity? It cannot simply be that man instinctively and
> unthinkingly finds its opposite - sweetness, or ripeness - more
> attractive. If this were true, it should have been true 20 years ago.
>
> Or is it just that wine drinkers of the world, who were once limited to
> a diet of wine made in relatively cool regions such as Bordeaux,
> Burgundy, Champagne and Germany which naturally produced wines high in
> acidity, have now been exposed to stronger wines from much warmer
> climates such as those of California and Australia and their palates
> have been re-tuned?

I wouldn't say that "strength" per se is the issue; rather it is a matter
of deciding that grapes picked closer to maturity make better tasting wines.

> I suspect this change in consumer taste has come about mainly because of
> our late 20th century desire for instant gratification. We have lost the
> habit of waiting for anything (I admit my own impatience when my pc
> takes all of a minute to re-boot). Rather than waiting for a wine to
> mature, we want it to be delicious from the moment it makes its first
> appearance outside the cellar

Why do you make that sound like a bad thing?

> This means that wines, even very fine wines, have to be made in more of
> a hurry than in the old days. They are put into oak as early as
> possible, increasingly before malolactic fermentation has even started,
> even though grapes are deliberately picked much, much later than they
> were.

Again, what's the harm in improving the process?

> In many ways this new precociousness is a good thing. It certainly makes
> tasting young wines much more fun, and it means that consumers no longer
> have to tie up vast amounts of capital in order to enjoy fine wine.

We are still in agreement.

> But there is a price to pay. The most obvious is the observed, although
> not widely reported, increase in the incidence of that nasty yeast
> strain Brettanomyces, or 'Brett' as it is chummily known in the US.
> Acidity is not just refreshing, it is great at warding off harmful
> bacteria and winemaking disaster. In fact the conditions that favour the
> development of the unpleasant mousey-smelling aromas associated with too
> much Brett (a little can be fine; a lot is offputting) are very ripe
> grapes, low acidity, concentrated musts and prolonged oak ageing - all
> of these typical characteristics of modern wine.

There's a germ of truth in that, but the fact is that Bordeaux pretty much
put Brett on the map _prior_ to the changes in winemaking style you've
alluded to. IOW, the presence of Brett in wine is mostly due to sloppy
winemaking practice.

True, the higher pH of riper grapes tends to be more Brett friendly, as is
badly tended barrel aging practice. Still, a good winemaker keeps his
sulfite levels where they need to be to inhibit spoilage organisms and
maintains his barreled wines topped up and bunged tightly. Under these
conditions Brett does not have any room to survive.

> The other consequence of the marked reduction in modern wine's average
> acidity may well be that they do not age as well.

Probably true, but so what? Wineries produce a new vintage every year!
What difference does it make if their current vintage only lasts 5 years?
It'll likely be gone by then anyway, and there are several later vintages
still available.

> With red wines however it is still too early to tell whether the new,
> super-ripe style that is now so popular (the result, some French
> observers claim, of a 'banalisation of taste') will be capable of ageing
> anything like as long as the wines of yesteryear that were initially
> more austere. I could well be wrong but it instinctively seems unlikely
> that they will.

Red wines have inherently longer ageworthiness. I've seen some of those
"soft" California wines go on for decades - and a few of them were whites.
Check out the recent thread on the 1974 California Cabernets.

> You will have worked out by now that I am a fan of acidity in wine. Not
that I am advocating picking grapes so early that, while natural
> acidity may be high, there is hardly any fruit or flavour.

That's *exactly* what happened here in California in the late 1970s. Our
fine wine industry couldn't just let itself continue to be successful doing
what it had been doing, which was making perfectly ripe grapes into
magnificent wines. They made the mistake of listening to the wine
_critics_, who panned those great wines of the early-mid 70s as "overblown".
They then proceeded to dial back things a bit in a futile attempt to emulate
the style of European (French) wines: harvesting early, at higher acidity
and lower pH, making what they called "food wines".

BAH! That stuff was DRECK!! It was, perhaps, the main reason I began to
make my own wines. I wanted something I could stand to _drink_, and I knew
I could do better than that plonk! We have the best fruit in the world
here, but the local wineries were _ruining_ it, turning it into austere,
fruitless battery acid. They've since retreated from that idiotic position
to making decent wine again, but have not gone far enough IMO. Meanwhile, I
continue on my quest for the Ultimate Chardonnay...

Tom S