With a pretty fair meal today at MezzoGiorno, a new restaurant in Madrid run by Maurizio Oggianu, a Sardinian chef, I had a bottle of Sa Mola 2007 Alberto Loi, a decent cannonau di Sardegna. The back label said '14.0% alc.', and I say "No way". It was an easy 15.5/16%. The hot finish was its main drawback. It's indeed almost impossible to get grenache grapes to ripen correctly at under 15% anywhere in Europe south of, say, Orange on the Rhne. (Not that there are many grenache vineyards north of Orange, come to think of it...)
Which reminds me of assertions often made to me in France that most of those labels from the 1970s and 1980s which read '12.0%' or '12.5%' were pre-printed and no one checked their accuracy - they just reflected what the public was accustomed to seeing at the time. I have also heard that analyses of the great Bordeaux 1945s made years later revealed alcohol levels between 14% and 15%.
There's no question that the quest for 'full ripeness' (= overripeness, most often) added to climate change and the sorry accumulation of chemicals in many soils have combined to increase alcohol levels in many places. But are the differences as striking as it seems, or has there been a lot of underreporting of alcohol levels? I'd say in regions with less than stringent controls it's still the case.
Which reminds me of assertions often made to me in France that most of those labels from the 1970s and 1980s which read '12.0%' or '12.5%' were pre-printed and no one checked their accuracy - they just reflected what the public was accustomed to seeing at the time. I have also heard that analyses of the great Bordeaux 1945s made years later revealed alcohol levels between 14% and 15%.
There's no question that the quest for 'full ripeness' (= overripeness, most often) added to climate change and the sorry accumulation of chemicals in many soils have combined to increase alcohol levels in many places. But are the differences as striking as it seems, or has there been a lot of underreporting of alcohol levels? I'd say in regions with less than stringent controls it's still the case.
