forceberry
Posts: 905
Joined: 8/4/2017
From: Finland
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ORIGINAL: hankj
Have you made wine or beer Forceberry? [EDIT - this sounds arrogant but I don't mean it like that, just have many times personally struggled with RS in the dynamic outlined hereafter]
No, unfortunately not, but I've read quite a bit of theory and chemistry on both. I also have close to 10 homebrewer friends whose work I often follow and whom I occasionally even consult on some chemistry-related questions. My own homebrewing experiences are mainly related to making homemade mead every spring (a Finnish thing).
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I've made a little of the former and a lot of the latter, and can tell you from that experience that the strain or strains of yeast a vintner or brewer chooses make a big difference in how dry "fermented to dry" is. Some strains, like for instance Epernay, voraciously consume every last bit of sugar and make the wine bone dry. Other strains are slower working, and/or have a lower affinity to fructose, and/or aren't as effective in cooler fermentations, and so are choked into dormancy by soaking in alcohol before they eat up every last bit of fructose (I think that's how the science works - the alcohol physically throttles the yeast one by one :).
I'm very familiar with how different yeast strains work, that they produce during the fermentation, what they require for the fermentation to run smoothly, etc. etc. I also know how some yeast strains can consume the wine bone dry, while some start to struggle close to the finishing line - that might also be because of the WA preference to make wines wines often up to 15% alcohol and even higher. It's quite normal for a yeast to struggle in alc% that high.
However, it's pretty normal in Northern Rhône - and other parts of the world - to ferment the wine spontaneously and then let the wine finish its fermentation in barrels or in casks so even that a majority of yeasts might struggle, there are always some strains that will live on, finishing the wine bone dry - given there's enough nutrients for the yeasts to work.
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So be clear I'm not saying dry red wines with just enough sugar to buffer harshness/find balance are made on the bench with simply syrup and/or arrested fermentation. Rather the are made by pitching must with reasonable density with the right combinations of yeast at the correct fermentation temperature. And then sometimes making very small adjustments - intervention can be a good thing.
I'd say making the wine finish with a touch of RS, say 6-10 g/l, is much easier - and feasible - to make by arresting fermentation than by making calculations how much precisely one might need yeasts etc. to make the wine finish at that range and not, say, 5-20 g/l of residual sugar. I agree that intervention can be a good thing, but in my preferences that kind of intervention usually means by adding a minimum effective amount of sulfites to keep the levels of acetic acid rising etc. - i.e. making the wine stay good and drinkable as long as possible. Intervention can be a good thing when you try to keep your wine good. However, I think we're quite a bit in a different territory, where intervention and small adjustments to make the wine more palatable are acceptable - those kinds of gimmicks are usually reserved for the industrial wines. If a wine doesn't become better with aging, be it in barrels or bottles, I don't think that the winemaker should change the wine to be more easily approachable for a wider audience - those, who like the wines, will eventually find them. Maybe, instead of suggesting that the winemakers would make wines better suited to you palate, you should just keep avoiding the WA Syrah wines? For example I can't understand the boring appassimento wines of Veneto or modern, over-extracted Bordeaux wines, but I'm not saying they should change their style to fit my palate. I just keep avoiding them.
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I very much like Northern Rhone wines too. And they are usually really dry - dry as a bone Rhone - and should be - they are the correct weight for their given RS levels.
The Washington wines I"m talking about though are fundamentally different. WA State is appreciably hotter. Our riper, heat-toughened thicker-skinned grapes are too often soaked longer and warmer. And then it seems like they get pressed harder. And then pitched with an really aggressive commercial yeast that burns very nearly all of that abundance of sugar into alcohol, leaving all of this structure and density unbalanced and unbuffered.
I've never been to either one of the places, but from what I've heard from my friends who have visited Côte-Rôtie and other places in the northern Rhône, they aren't particularly cool places. But they do have noticeably big diurnal variation in the temperature.
However, some points you addressed might be at the core of our little dispute here. Long soak times, hard pressing, aggressive commercial yeasts etc. To me, these sound like rustic winemaking practices that have died out in many parts of the world. Reminds me of the winemaking practices from 40-50 years back in Northern Rhône, really. So maybe, instead of trying to spoof the wines by manipulating the wine in attempt to leave a little bit of residual sugar, they should improve their winemaking practices? So instead of increasing the manipulation, they could actually decrease it by very minor adjustments in their winemaking process. Not letting the grapes ripen too much, delicate pressing and softer extraction, natural yeasts, no new wood to contribute to the excess bitterness? Sounds like a wine right up my alley!
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I think the fundamental crux of our friendly disagreement here though are our competing notions of how sugar and bitter balance (or don't) on the palate.
Let me propose Campari as an object example. Sure the sugar doesn't "mask" the bitterness - it doesn't make it go away or become invisible to one's sensory organs. But can you imagine how harsh Campari would taste without the sugar? I think it is very clear that if you gave taster both Campari and Campari with no sugar, then asked them which was more bitter and more harsh they'd invariably and without hesitation say the one without the sugar. Even if technically the Campari with sugar is firing the same exact number of bitter-sensing taste buds, the sugar is also firing the receptors with an affinity for it, and because that info is comingled with the bitter signals the brain perceives less bitter and less harsh. And in the end the perception is what matters - it's the only way aesthetics are transparent to us and so is as good as reality (or, depending on your favored epistemic stance, is reality). So yes, I stand by the notion that a smidge of RS actually makes big extracted reds less harsh.
Now you try to substitute a wholly another thing entirely into the discussion. Tannins are about astringency, Campari is about bitterness. While tannins can contribute to bitterness, the really don't do it unless in noticeably high concentrations. Of course I can understand the relevance of this analogy, because both bitterness and astringency can contribute to the roughness of the wine.
I'd love to taste Campari without sugar. However, as sugar neither counteracts bitterness, I'd say that un-sugared Campari might actually taste quite as bitter as the normal version. After all, with that much sugar, normal Campari should be like some easy-drinking soda, but instead on its own, it is almost unbearably bitter to many people I know. Of course sugar can help a bit, because of the comingling phenomenon you described. Of course boosting residual sugar in a wine makes it more approachable, that much I'm not trying to refute here, but unlike you propose, it really doesn't lessen the perception tannins or the bitterness. And I'd say that at the "smidge" level you propose (I'd love to hear how much that would actually be), the effect against bitterness OR tannins is pretty minuscule. It mainly makes the fruit feel jammier, pretty little beyond that. If you have a wine that feels excessively bitter wine, you'd have to leave much more than just a "smidge" of residual sugar.
As my final statement, I think that you are somewhat on the right tracks, but trying to fight the cause with wrong means. First off, if I were you, I'd just keep on avoiding the WA Syrah wines instead of arguing why they should change their style to suit your particular taste. Secondly, I think that you've located the heart of the problem (the winemaking practices), but instead of trying to change the problem itself, you want to fix only the symptoms. It feels like you are - as a Finnish proverb goes - trying to climb a tree ass-first.
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RE: Syrah.. Washington Vs. California - 
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