Reported vs true abv

I know this is a topic that people can be understandably cagey about but, if people are willing to share, I’m interested in philosophies about wine labelling regarding alcohol.

I work in a lab that analyses wines. Many of the wines we see are unfinished or otherwise not yet bottled, but we do get some wines that are bottled and labelled, so when we run the alcohol analyses we see the extent to which people are labelling accurately or utilizing the +/- leeway in abv labelling that is legally permitted.

It seems like there are lots of reasons people make choices about how to label their wines and I’m curious to hear from anyone in this community who has a perspective on this. I know some people label as accurately as possible because they want the consumer to know what they are drinking. Some people label somewhere in the middle of their year-on-year variation for a bottling to reduce label changes between vintages. Some people label high-alcohol wines as low-abv as possible to avoid putting people off. And I know some people choose to label the alcohol content according to how it feels sensorily - say you produce a 15% wine but it tastes to you more like what you think of when you see 14.3%. I see valid reasons for all of these choices and more, and it’s interesting to see how it varies between varieties, price points, and individual producers.

Any thoughts on this from anyone here in production or marketing?

As a consumer, I wish they would label it as accurately as they could. I’ll give leeway for labeling a 15% as 14.9% if it tastes more like a 14er, but that’s the extent of what they should do.

We try to remain within close approximations.

A Pinot label at 14.8% does look a hell of a lot better than one labeled at 15.2% though. :wink:

±0.5 is the legal norm here so we try to use the closest round 0.5
One important point is that to avoid wasting paper our backlabel are non-vintage so we’ll use a standard 13.5% backlabel as long as our vintage is in the 13-14% range.

I believe the general public tend to give too much importance to the ABV and that this modify their taste perceptions. I always provide my importer with analysis and my technical sheet contains all the numbers but I prefer to have the tasters taste the wine before they see the numbers so they don’t taste with a preconceived idea of what’s in the glass. Some of our 2018 is higher in alcohol than usual but no taster I meet was able to feel it before I gave them the number, and most were genuinely surprised.

As a general thing I think many estate would prefer to round down the label number on wines above 14% (not speaking of above 15% obviously…) but with the US tariff, I believe you’re about to see many wines labelled at 14.1% that taste surprisingly fresh… [whistle.gif]

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That’s slightly off topic but in Japan, sake ABV is almost always labelled as in-between 2 numbers like 15-16 and if only one number is on the label then it can be +/- 1% and nobody really care.
The fun part is that one of my friend is producing (excellent) sake in France and exporting to Japan. He sent bottle labelled exactly and his labels were rejected by the importer for being too precise!!

Yeah, I agree that people assign too much importance to ABV rather than balance, especially when the imprecision of labeling is so high and practices vary so much by producer. I like the old import labels from Europe that said 11-14% alcohol for, say, Bordeaux. Less precise but more accurate and less likely to lead to consumers hand-wringing over a few tenths of a percent on the label.

With the new tariffs I believe it’ll actually be illegal for any wines under 14% to be labeled as over 14%. That’s currently already true for domestic wines. If your wine is 13.9% you can only label it as 12.4 to 13.9%, but if your wine is 14% you can label it as 14 to 15% (I’m 99% sure that this is right but if someone knows better, please do speak up).

What I find a little frustrating is when producers label different wines in their range at different precisions. So you could have, say, a California producer with a Chardonnay with 14.2% alcohol labeled as 14.2%, a Pinot Noir with 15.4% labeled as 14.4%, a Cabernet with 14.6% labeled as 14.6%, a Sauvignon Blanc with 12.5% listed as 13.8% and a Zinfandel with 16.5% labeled as 15.5%. So what the labels suggest is pretty reasonable alcohol levels across the range, but the Chardonnay and Cab taste balanced, the Sauvignon Blanc much leaner and greener than expected, the Zinfandel much bigger than expected, and the Pinot much too alcoholic (these are genuinely hypothetical numbers not based on any specific producer).