Millennial wine drinkers, we were told, love to try different things. But by contrast, many California winemakers are still trying to make red wines that fit the standard model: soft and plush.
This model is what wine marketing people say consumers want, based on the scores that historically have been given to red wines of dark color and weight. But are such wines selling?
It is risky to make a red wine with “wimpy” color these days, even if the result is a lot better but lighter wine. I reached this conclusion after California’s somewhat clumsy, very dark 1997 cabernets came out. A few were OK, but in time, many of them faded.
Dark color, in and of itself, is not a great predictor of quality. To me, dark color is optional. I have tasted light red wines that carried superb flavors and nearly black wines that were so clumsy, I couldn’t drink them.
I believe that today, many winemakers have been told by their owners to make a style of wine that is weight-driven. This is being done to create wines that get high scores. Some critics love dark-colored wines.
From what I am tasting, some winemakers are using legal additives to boost color. This includes the use of the concentrate Mega Purple. This product can make red wines much darker, almost to the point of looking black. But the flavors that are achieved are unappealing to me.
That includes some lower-priced pinot noirs. At one competition where I was asked to judge, I was served 30 pinot noirs. The colors were all similar to what cabernet sauvignon used to be.
I guessed that some of these wines had petite sirah or more likely sirah added to them to darken them. Then I got 30 cabernets to judge. All of them were as dark as sirah.
Among the best wines I tasted at this competition were two that had significantly lighter colors—along with lovely aromatic components that the darker wines lacked.
Shortly after this episode, I had a brief chat with a famed Napa Valley winemaker. He said something distressing: “Winemakers all over Napa are rushing to buy potassium bicarbonate,” a chemical that raises the pH of wine and makes it softer by compromising acidity.
He added that the type of wine many wineries have made in the last decade or more were routinely softened by similar tactics.
Wine lovers are at a crossroads. At a time when the scoring of wines by numbers is fast losing favor in the market, we face some wines that are so big and unctuous but don’t taste very interesting.
At the very same time, wine sales throughout the United States are declining rapidly. It’s easy to draw the conclusion that the big and concentrated wines of the past are partly to blame.
A tablemate at a wine judging recently was an East Coast wine columnist who is savvy about wine trends. We chatted briefly about the lack of distinction in the wines we were being asked to evaluate.
“I wondered about this a few years ago,” she said, suggesting that the style of many domestic wines has become so homogenous that varietal aromas have been rooted out of most wines.
As a result, she said, she began asking herself, “Wouldn’t I rather have the French version?”
