Wine and alcohol – should Abv. help decide what to buy?

[dunstanburgh]

@Alchemist

Just pour yourself 90% of the Amarone and enjoy

Logically, I can’t argue with that. But … temptation and Oscar Wilde come to mind.
On a related but separate tack, it’ll be fascinating to see next January onwards whether excise duty encourages more folks to look for lower Abv wines.

[dshepuk]

This is really interesting. I’ve often wondered whether diluting high ABV wine would work but for some reason have never tried it. Maybe it just feels too strange! But I will give it a try I think.

Does anybody else do this out of interest?

I tend to stick to 14% & below nowadays so disappointed to hear the 2020 Meerlust Rubicon is 14.55% because I ordered a case without realising - it’s a wine I buy every year but I think that will be the highest ABV I’ve seen.

I’d like to see more Loire reds at TWS.

[peterm]

@dshepuk

Does anybody else do this out of interest?

Ridge do. They’re not the only ones who do it but they declare it on their labels

[SteveSlatcher]

@peterm

The abv on bottles is not accurate. EU wine law (and thus also the EU) allow only whole numbers or halves, i.e. xx.0 or xx.5 and there’s quite a large leeway allowed in the figure the winery chooses to display on the label.

It’s even worse than that:

The ABV on the label can be the measured percentage rounded up or down - not necessarily to the closest integer multiple of 0.5%.

Then there is the accuracy of the measurement technique, which I think must give results within 0.5% of the true value.

So the stated value could be nearly 1 percentage point away from the actual ABV.