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Hi! my name is Kian Tavakoli and I am one of the wine makers here at CrushPad and I want to welcome you to this installment of Winemaker’s minute.

So, for today we are going to be talking about one of the pretty much important aspects of the wine making which to some extent it is related to style and that is alcohol level in the wine and how do we even achieve that? How is alcohol actually generated in wine making?

For any of you out there who do not really know the concepts and the kinetics of fermentation? What it is? It is a yeast that actually converts sugar into alcohol. And the higher the sugar level in your juice, the higher your alcohol level is going to be. Now, in terms of how that alcohol reflects in your style, if you are looking and making a very fruit forward, rich, dense, a style of wine with a lot of power and a lot of glycerol content so that when you are swirling the wine in the glass you get some nice legs coming through and stick into the glass, then you look on having your alcohol level be fairly high. And by high, we are talking anywhere between 14.5 and 15.5% alcohol.

If you are looking at something a little bit more elegant, little softer in style, and also to have some food friendliness to it, then we are looking at probably in the-- or low 14s, high 13s to low 14s. Now, when it comes to making the decision for picking grapes, that is where we take into account the sugar content as well as flavors.

Flavor is very important when it comes to picking grapes and as the sugar accumulates in the grapes, that is what dictates what the potential alcohol of your wine going to be. And to talk about sugar level, we actually measure that level in a versions of brix or in the increments of brix, that is the level that we actually term or the unit that we term for measuring sugar content.

So to give you some examples, a cab that we would be looking at, picking at about 24 and a half degrees brix would give you an alcohol, a potential alcohol level of approximately 14.5 to 14.7%, that is usually in that 57-60% conversion.

What if we have a fruit that is hanging and ready to be picked? But all the sudden we have a nasty heat spike that hits the vineyard very quickly right before picking, that in turn shoots the sugar up fairly quickly because its dehydrating the berries and in turn we end up with potential alcohol level of possibly greater than 15.5 closer to the 16, which is probably not very comfortable with a lot of our clients that want to make more balanced wines.

What to do when you have these levels of sugars in the must? The option that we have here at the winery is a fancy word that we use called Amelioration, so actually just watering of the must. And what it involves in is basically dehydrating those berries due to the fact that the heat spike in the vineyard dehydrated them.

So, in summary, in talking about, you know, how one level of alcohol we want to achieve in our wine. The number one element to really kind of keep in mind is balance. It is how you want that alcohol complementing the rest of the elements in your wine in terms of fruit, in terms of the acid profile of the wine, in terms of the just the complexity and the structure that you are trying to achieve.

One thing you want to keep in mind is that no matter what the level of alcohol is the least favorable expression is the heat that somebody notices in the finish of the wine.

We can have wines that are very concentrated in fruit and in those concentrated years, you can actually get a way with a little bit of extra alcohol. Meaning, you can push the envelope and get to about 15.5 when you have that power of fruit balance then good. But if you have a softer year, you have a vintage where the fruit is a little bit more elegant and softer, it is probably is prudent to kind of keep that alcohol level more in check so that it does not overpower the finish of the wine.

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