It is more than just the 1.5% fudge factor. I’ve seen a few of the measurements that Mike is speaking of and the legal range meant little. The ability to as well as the desire to test for things in the past was lacking. Wineries didn’t do it and very few seemed to care. If the wine tasted balance it was. In Robert Benson’s book, “Great Winemakers of California”, Joe Heitz talks about their Cabernets not going through ML because they didn’t inoculate for it nor did they test for it, so they assumed it didn’t go through. Kind of funny and endearing…and honest.
When I first became interested in wine in the 1980s, I lived in the Bay Area and I remember that it was accepted wisdom that botrytis did not occur naturally in California – you had to spray it on to get it.
Yes, I remember at the tail end of the 70s and in the early 80s, there were some monsters. A friend and I used to get very excited when we popped the cork on one of those zin. We’d point out the ABV to one another. As I recall, there was an effort to scale back in the mid-80s. That’s when the term “food wine” came into vogue. The cabs of 84-86 tended to be a bit more restrained than they had been a few years earlier, too, as I recall.
When I first became interested in wine in the 1980s, I lived in the Bay Area and I remember that it was accepted wisdom that botrytis did not occur naturally in California – you had to spray it on to get it.
Louis P. Martini did his graduate school thesis saying otherwise and Freemark Abbey proved it with their first Edelwine in the early 70’s.
I used to buy Ridge Lytton Springs with some regularity, and can remember hosting a vertical tasting of the 1990, '91, '93 and '94 versions. Seems to me that alcohol level was 13.5-14% in those wines. But later vintages had a warmer and (to me) slightly bitter finish that I didn’t enjoy, so I stopped buying these wines. Same with CdP.
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