Winemaker tricks

[Mark Sommelier]

Dear Lady Robinson,

Thank you for participating. Do you have strong opinions regarding such practices as reverse osmosis, chaptalisation, de-acidifying, oak chips and other tricks winemakers use to produce 90+ point wines? How much is too much?

[Jancis Robinson]

I have old-fashioned intuitions such as, as will already be clear, the best-balanced, healthiest grapes make the best wines. In an ideal world the winemaker would not need to intervene. I'm still extremely sceptical about concentration techniques and even those who pioneered them (LLC and Cos for example) are rather repudiating them now.

Can't really condone routine chaptalisation even (common throughout France) now that global warming has come along.

Oak chips serve a purpose, it seems to me. I don't like them much but a lot of people who never age wine seem to like the taste of oak. Waste of money to use expensive oak barrels on them.

Deacidifying should be a desperate remedy in an unusually mean vintage. I notice you don't mention acidification which is of course routine in many warmer wine regions...?

And what do you make of the increasing practice of adding water to wines made from grapes that reach phenolic ripeness only at uncomfortably high potential alcohol levels? I must try to knock out an article on that philosophically interesting subject.