Water is also used: this reduces alcohol during wine production.

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Gone are the days when concentrated wines with a lot of alcohol automatically lead to high wine ratings and high demand. Today, consumers are increasingly looking for wines with elegance and freshness, so wineries are focusing heavily on these two characteristics.

One of the biggest factors in producing fresh and elegant wines is alcohol content. To keep this under control, wineries can start both in the vineyard and in the cellar. While some measures are easy and cheap to implement, others require costly investments.

The longer the grapes hang on the vine, the more sugar accumulates in them. During the fermentation of grape must, yeast converts sugar into alcohol. The more sugar in the grapes, the higher the alcohol content in the wine. Therefore, harvesting grapes early with lower sugar content results in lower alcohol wines. However, there is a risk that grapes containing unripe aroma or tannins will negatively affect the quality of the wine.

A lot of sugar accumulates in the fruits of grape varieties such as Grenache noir, resulting in high alcohol wines. Counoise or Cinsaut, on the other hand, produces significantly less sugar and also ripens earlier in the season. Well-known wineries such as Château de Beaucastel in the Rhone Valley in southern France are increasing the proportion of these types of grapes to give the wines greater elegance and freshness.

In some places, major wine-producing countries, such as the United States, allow the controlled addition of water to fermenting grape must to reduce the alcohol content. However, this practice has the disadvantage of diluting the wine’s acids and aromas, often resulting in reduced wine quality.

If the yeasts die during fermentation before all the sugar has been fermented, the alcohol content will not increase further. This leads to wines with lower alcohol content, but also containing residual sugar. Well-known examples are White Zinfandel Rosé from California or Rieslings from Germany’s Moselle region.

Modern wineries can use a variety of methods to reduce the alcohol content in wine. An example of this is reverse osmosis, where the individual components of wine, such as water or alcohol, can be separated from each other, processed, and finally combined again. However, such a process is expensive and usually only available at large wineries.

Source : Blick