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Spinning Your Cone
The revenge of Frankinvine

            Visit a winery, and you’ll see tanks and barrels, trellises and even the bottling line. But one thing they won’t show you is a spinning cone.

            This occurs to me one afternoon, as I return from a four-mile run, dehydrated and slippery with sweat. After gulping water, I search for wine. German Riesling would be nice, at about 7% or 8% alcohol. But all I find are Australian Chardonnay at 14.5%, and Lodi Zinfandel at 16 and counting; the roofies of the wine world.

            In 1971, the average Napa Valley wine had 12.5% alcohol. Today 14.8% is the norm. What’s going on?

            It started with the hot dry climates of the New World, which produced riper grapes. This prompted the Old World, aided by new technology to start picking later in the season. Then, global warming heated up the world’s vineyards, resulting in even lusher, stronger wine.

            Another factor is the numbers game. When a critic sits down to forty wines, bold and brash ones out-shout subtle and elegant every time. Since alcohol is a great carrier of aroma, flavor and body, blockbuster wines tend to win higher ratings.

             But super-high-test wine is often sweet, over-rich and pruney. It loses the balance and freshness that helps it wash down food. Europeans scoff at these wines, calling them obvious, unsophisticated fruit bombs.

            And many American wineries would like to make leaner wine, especially since anything over 14% is taxed at a higher rate. But they’re up against a monster they can’t control: Frankenvines. 

            Back in the 1870’s, the American root louse phylloxera hitched a ride across the Atlantic and gobbled its way through the vineyards of Europe. It nearly wiped them out, until someone realized that you could make European vinifera vines immune by grafting them onto American rootstock. That’s what most of the world did for over a century. But lice evolve, and another outbreak in the 1990s had California scrambling to uproot and replant with the newest resistant stock.  

            Now, normally in grapes, flavor and sugar develop in tandem. But something weird happened with the Frankenvines of the 1990s. Somehow, sugar ripeness got uncoupled from flavor ripeness. This resulted in grapes that were super-sweet long before they developed much flavor. Since sugar becomes alcohol, waiting long enough for flavorful grapes resulted in very boozy wines.

            The obvious solution is dilution, but it’s illegal. Although you’ll find  many wineries surprisingly aggressive about washing up and hosing down their tanks.

            But there are other ways of de-alcing or removing alcohol. They include reverse osmosis as well as a thing called the spinning cone, which uses vacuums and centrifugal force to separate alcohol from essence.

            Although these processes are legal, you’re more likely to see a Free Mason initiation rite on YouTube than to hear wineries discuss them. Why the secrecy? To jibe with the fantasies of a gullible public and sensationalist press. Wine, you see, is meant to be a natural product of the earth. A good winemaker is but a shepherd, gently guiding from first bud, through spontaneous fermentation until the moment the stuff hops into a bottle and labels itself.

            This mystique is so strong that many European languages don’t even have a word for winemaker. That which I cannot name does not exist, right?

            Off course the truth is that to make wine you have to select land, prepare soil, choose rootstock, sort through clones, erect trellising systems, prune, fertilize, chase away pests…and that’s just in the vineyard. The “interference” continues in the winery.

            There’s also the romantic notion of “terroir,” the unique thumbprint of soil, weather and other variables on a finished wine. Surely, putting wines through big, computerized machines, fraught with their insensate modernity, will strip every last trace of good, honest terroir!

            Actually, users of these atrocities insist that removing a little alcohol allows terroir to shine through loud and clear. There’s nothing inherently evil about technology and wine has never made itself anyway. If I can find a bottle with full flavor and modest buzz that quenches my thirst to boot, I don’t care if it went through a nuclear reactor. And if it did, who knows, it might make me run faster.

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