Howard County Times/North County News

Wine: Do You Get What You Pay For?

By: Lisa M. Airey

It is tough to find a truly bad bottle of wine on the market these days. Grape growing and wine making technologies have made quantum leaps in the past thirty years. As a result, wine quality continues to climb and at every price point. It is a good time to be a wine drinker. You do not need to spend a fortune to drink well.

Much is factored into the price of a bottle of wine.

Let’s start in the vineyard. The wine world combats the vineyard scourges of phylloxera and nematodes by grafting the vulnerable European grape varieties like Chardonnay and Syrah onto resistant rootstocks. Luckily, there are still some wine regions of the world unaffected by these pests and the cost savings there are considerable. In Australia, for example, grafted grapevines cost $4.50 a piece; ungrafted vines cost 70¢. It is significantly cheaper to plant an ungrafted vineyard than a grafted one Down Under and, completely feasible to do so. Moreover, ungrafted vines live longer than grafted ones so the savings are both short term and long run for all concerned.

In the winery, one of the most expensive wine making practices is the incorporation of an oak barrel for fermentation or storage. The use of American oak barrels bumps up the cost of a bottle of wine by 40¢; French oak raises the bottle cost by $1. Obviously, you pay more for a barrel-fermented Chardonnay, but is it better? Not necessarily. It is just stylistically different. Some people prefer the crisp, clean green apple flavor of unoaked Chardonnay while others adore the coconut, vanilla, and toast flavors imparted by wood.

Couple these two examples with supply and demand, the cost of debt, advertising, and other variables in production costs and you will find that two bottles of wine of comparable quality can have two very different price tags on the retail shelf.

A higher price is not always a guarantee of superior pedigree. Taste is. You can judge a wine’s quality by the nature of the flavors in the glass.

Wine can be up to 85% water! The remaining components comprise a fluid mix of alcohol (7-15%), acid (1%), sugar (0-10%) and extract (.5%). Extract is what is left at the bottom of the wineglass if you boil off all of the liquid components. Extract equates to flavor. Extract equates to quality.

The higher the extract level in a wine, the more flavor it possesses and the more adjectives you can ascribe to it. Extract is quantifiable by lab analysis, but in lieu of that, perform this simple exercise: Take a sip of wine and swallow it. Count the number of times you swallow AFTER that initial sip. The more “swallows”, the higher the extract level.

To put this into practical perspective, if you purchase a $7 bottle of wine and find it loaded with extract (and filled with flavors you enjoy), go back and buy it by the case! If you purchase a $15 bottle of wine and find it lacking in flavor and in concentration of flavor, you’ve spent too much.

But remember, a wine of high extract and plenty of flavor will do you no good if you do not care for the flavors in the glass! Here’s where personal preference comes into play. Just because it is a “good” wine, does not mean you have to like it!

Compare these two very nice wines:

Louis Bernard Cotes du Rhone 2001 $10.99, Wines Ltd.: a perfumed glass of raspberry fruit with a sprinkling of spice in the finish

Rock Rabbit Syrah 2002: Henry Wine Group $12.99: all blackberry jam, leather, vanilla and smoke

Email me! Thewinekey@aol.com In your opinion, which one has more extract? Which one did you prefer?

Learn More!

Phylloxera is a root louse indigenous to North America that feeds on vine roots. The bite wounds phylloxera inflicts enable rot and infection to invade the plant and kill it. Native North American vines are not susceptible to this pest because their rootstocks are capable of scabbing over the bite wounds, thus preventing the decay and death of the vine. This “immunity” saved the wine industry as we know it.

Back in the 1800s, the unrestricted exchange of plant materials between nations inadvertently took phylloxera to Europe where it began to decimate the vineyards. Complete disaster was avoided by grafting the vulnerable European vines onto phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks. This practice continues even today.

Nematodes are microscopic worms that feed on vine roots, eventually killing the plant. These pests are combated by grafting European varieties onto nematode-resistant rootstocks.