Ripeness, Alcohol and the End of Chaptalisation

For roughly two centuries, adding sugar to the must was a normal part of making red Burgundy. The fruit frequently arrived at ten or eleven potential degrees of alcohol, which makes a thin, short wine, and chaptalisation, named for Napoleon's minister Jean-Antoine Chaptal, raised it to something with body. The sugar ferments out entirely; it does not sweeten the wine, it raises the alcohol.

It is now rare, and the refrain heard across the Côte is some version of the same sentence: my father chaptalised every year of his working life, and I have done it twice. That is as clear a marker of what has happened as any dataset, and it comes from people with no interest in making a point about the climate.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Village reds that reached 12.5 per cent with help now reach 13.5 without it, and warm vintages push higher still. Roughly a degree and a half of gain since the 1980s. The number matters beyond what is printed on the label, because alcohol changes texture and perceived sweetness, and it shortens the window in which a wine feels balanced. A region whose style depended on modest alcohol has had that variable moved out from under it.

Underneath is a harder problem that Burgundy is meeting properly for the first time: sugar ripeness and phenolic ripeness have come apart. Sugar accumulates quickly in heat. Tannins in skins, seeds and stems develop on their own slower schedule, along with the aromatic precursors that give a wine its character. In a hot year the two can separate, so that the fruit is sugar-ripe while the skins are not. Pick on sugar alone and you get a wine that is alcoholic and green at once, which is the least attractive combination available and was essentially unknown on the Côte forty years ago.

That leaves a genuine dilemma with no clean answer, only a choice about which fault to carry. Pick early for acidity and you risk hard, green tannins. Pick late for ripe tannin and you risk fourteen and a half degrees of alcohol and a heavy wine. Growers split on it, and the split explains a great deal of the stylistic variation between neighbouring domaines in recent hot vintages. Anybody who tells you their approach has no cost is describing a marketing position rather than a decision.

Some of the responses are elegant. A number of growers have returned to whole-cluster fermentation partly because stems absorb a little alcohol and add a savoury lift, which is a nice illustration of an old technique being revived for an entirely new reason: whole clusters were once traditional because destemming was laborious, were then abandoned in pursuit of pure fruit, and are now back because the vintages changed.

And then there is acidification, which is permitted in hot vintages and used quietly by a fair number of cellars. It is the exact mirror image of chaptalisation: a correction for a climate that has overshot rather than undershot. What is striking is the difference in how the two are discussed. Adding sugar was normal, spoken about openly, and nobody's reputation suffered. Adding acid is confessed. The chemistry gives no reason for the asymmetry; the cultural weight of tradition gives all of it.