Waarom nog chaptaliseren?
Alcoholvrije wijn. Veel liefhebbers van niet gemanipuleerde wijn een gruwel. Eerder iets voor consumenten die moeten oppassen met alcohol. Of voor de jagers in anti-alcohol-eskaders. Wijn met een verlaagd alcoholpercentage valt ook niet in de smaak bij het merendeel van gezonde verbruikers. Want destillatie en andere processen waarmee alcohol deels in rook opgaat, kunnen de smaak negatief beïnvloeden, ook al bestrijden de verminderingsdiscipelen dat nog zo hard. Kortom er zijn allerlei pro’s en contra’s in de publieke discussie te beluisteren. Wijnjournaliste Britt Karlsson geeft de stand van zaken voor ons weer:
“Apparently there is a huge interest in the world for wines with low alcohol contents. On www.decanter.com we read about a report by Wine Intelligence, made on behalf of ProWein, the big wine fair in Düsseldorf, which opens at the beginning of March. A “significant minority” of consumers in the US, UK, Germany and China say that their ideal wine is below 12%. Maybe this is very sensible of them to say but it is easier said than done.
“Natural” wines
It is an interesting trend, this low alcohol trend. It is very contrary to another of the big trends in wine today: the fashion for “natural” wines that we also see now in many different countries. For in most regions it is difficult to make wines with low alcohol without affecting their style and character. So “low alcohol” is sometimes the antithesis of “natural”.
Winemakers have in recent decades come to harvest later and later to obtain riper and riper grapes, which inevitably gives more and more alcohol in the finished wine. This trend has now calmed down a bit (and even sometimes reversed) and we now see some reduction in the alcohol levels, maybe from 14-15% to 13-13.5%.
That wines in general today have a higher alcohol content (on average) compared to, say, 20 years ago, is completely natural and is not only due to global warming och the maturity of the grapes. Today we also drink so much more wines from hot climate areas: the New World, southern France, southern Italy, countries and regions with a lot of sun where the grapes get high sugar content and thus high alcohol content in the wine.
So how do you get lower alcohol in your wine?
The EU allows since 2009 partially de-alcoholisation of wine, by reverse osmosis or vacuum distillation. It is allowed to decrease the alcohol content with no more than 2%. Techniques also exist to filter out the sugar from the grape juice before fermentation (and thus reducing the alcohol level in the finished wine) but these are not allowed to be used except perhaps for experimental purposes.
High yields
If you want to use more natural methods you can practice high yields and thereby get a diluted grape must. This results in lower sugar content, but you will hardly get a quality wine. Or you can plant grapes varieties that naturally give good flavors and ripeness at lower sugar levels. There are varieties like that but they have not really been much tried out yet.
There are also some specific yeast strains that transform the sugar in the must into less alcohol than normal yeast.
The question then is what you want? A quality wine with its natural alcohol level that you will drink less of (hopefully)? Or an uninteresting, “constructed” wine with lower alcohol content, which is probably so easy to drink that you finish the whole bottle (while hardly noticing it)?
Quality wines
But then we have another important point in this debate on alcohol levels: Why not start with the obvious, ban ALL chaptalisation? Chaptalisation is an artificial way of increasing the alcohol level in a wine. Why use advanced, expensive techniques like reverse osmosis to lower the alcohol when you are allowed to increase the alcohol level through chaptalisation?”
Perhaps we should stop talking about low alcohol wines and instead aim for quality wines with their natural alcohol contents? And perhaps we should put a stop to the artificial boosting of the alcohol contents by adding sugar to the must?
Bron: www.wijnwijs.eu
