Large, gritty tanker trucks seem to pull up to the gray, nondescript warehouse all day long. The building, which resembles a chemical plant, is hunkered down inside a fenced-off area at the end of a cul-de-sac in an industrial wasteland. Perhaps most astonishing, this bleak location is smack in the middle of the otherwise bucolic Russian River Valley of Sonoma County. It is here, behind closed doors, without a wine label in sight, that , millions of gallons of anonymous wine are pumped through machines that, in another guise, can be used to extricate salt from seawater. What happens here, every day, is one of the wine industry’s dirty little secrets.

The wine is recirculated under pressure through five-foot long beige honeycombed membrane tubes. It is undergoing what is colloquially known as “dealcing.” The alcohol in the wine is being adjusted, from say, 15.5 percent or higher, down to perhaps a more pleasing 14.4 percent.

The people who remove the alcohol insist that the flavors of the wine remain intact. The winemakers who send their wine to be dealcoholized, say that the procedure – one which is being utilized by a vast majority of California wineries – is just another tool to help them make better wine.

So just how widespread use is dealcing? According to officials at the two companies that offer the procedure, over the last year, their 1,600 winery clients – mostly all in California – had more than 42 million cases of wine run through their machines, or about 18% of all the wine produced in California in 2006.

Many large wine corporations utilize de-alcoholization to get their wines under 14.001 percent, in order to reduce their tax burden. After all, millions of cases at $1.07 a gallon for wines under that percentage, as opposed to $1.57 for wines over 14 percent, represents a lot of money.

How To Make Hot Wine Cooler

Others, mainly small producers, use the method as a means to bow to the marketplace which seems to crave overripe, intense wines. By using the reverse osmosis method, or the spinning cone, or even by adding water – the three procedures used to reduce alcohol – winemakers believe they can still maintain their wine’s concentrated flavors, but can better balance their wines by reducing the alcohol percentages.

Reverse osmosis (or RO) is the method used by Vinovation , whose facility is in that cul-de-sac at the edge of Sebastopol, California. The company, which claims it had 400 clients in ’06, filters a small portion of wine very tightly to allow only the alcohol, water, and volatile components to come through. This permeate is then distilled or run through a “perstraction” chamber, which uses the pressure differential to pull some of the alcohol out, and then recombines it.

The spinning cone is used by Santa Rosa, California-based ConeTech, which says it had 600 clients last year. The method employs a vertical stainless steel cylinder in which an inert stripping gas removes, under vacuum, a vapor stream of volatile compounds from liquids. The process is called “vacuum distillation” by the use of centrifugal force through the cones. According to ConeTech’s president Tony Dann, the spinning cone or SC, “Enables temperatures measurably lower than other distillation processes.”

The third way to reduce alcohol is to add water or “watering back,” as it’s become known in the industry. But by adding water, the wine is often diluted. In addition, the process is illegal, unless it is used for aiding wine that has been stuck in the fermentation process (which incidentally can be benefited by the legal use of RO or SC, as does (VA) or volatile acidity),

Why not just pick earlier, some ask, in order to lower alcohol? Due to warm climates in California, Australia, and South America; and winemakers’ averse fear of losing all green qualities in grapes they believe not to have achieved full physiological maturity, dealcing, they think, is the way to go.

But detractors of dealcing are adamant that the method is further evidence of manipulation of wine and the results of the process are that the natural elements of the concept of terroir, and a sense of place of their grapes, are mitigated. Those opposed to the practice are clearly in the silent minority.

A Conspiracy of Silence

However, those winemakers—of which there are plenty—who dealcoholize their wines, say they use the method sparingly; and are even cautious about admitting its use. Additionally, spokespeople at the two major companies that offer their equipment or facilities to dealcoholize wine, are loath to disclose the names of their clients.

“No way,” says ConeTech’s Dann, when asked the names of some of his clients. “Winemakers pander to consumer’s preferences. Some consumers might be aware of some technical systems, (but) these aren’t talked about so much.

“Winemakers just don’t like identifying themselves or being subjected to (explaining) a highly technical process. The winemaker will tell you what he did in the vineyard, about barrels. No way does he want to say that the wine was treated in some way. The winemaker wants it thought that his wine is pristine.”

Winemaker Charles Hendricks has used Vinovation. Hendricks, who has consulted for many clients before starting his own Napa Valley brand, Hope & Grace, takes a sanguine view of the procedure.

“Dealc? Who knows, maybe I’ll be on a desert island and I’ll need it for desalination of water,” he quips. But Hendricks, who purchased an RO machine for $70,000 from Vinovation in ’04 believes, “It’s all about flexibility. I don’t use the (RO) machine on a regular basis; only if I need to dial something in. It’s kind of next-level equipment that I thought would be fun to play with.”

(About 20 wineries have their own RO machines, while, according to ConeTech’s Dann, Sutter Home is the only winery to have its own SC. Because of the prohibitive cost, which Dann says is “north of $2 million,” ConeTech’s facilities are often the only option. Sutter Home uses the machine for its non-alcoholic Fre brand.)

However, Hendricks, despite the “fun,” readily admits that by dealcing, wines lose something, mainly any regional characteristics.

Taking Terroir Out of Wine

“What terroir gives you is the fruit component and fruit structure. When you run it through the machine it tends to dumb that fruit,” he says. “That’s what you’re giving up. You’re losing that terroir character. I admit that. You’re salvaging something that is still very nice, but you’re not abandoning it, you’re adding something to it.

“RO is not the end-all, but it’s another arrow in your quiver. It’s a tool.”

Michael Havens, who recently sold his Napa Valley Havens Wine Cellars, believes that the concept of terroir is just that – a notion – and that the use of dealcoholization has nothing to do with it. He says he used RO only once to reduce alcohol and a couple of times to get rid of VA.

“Every winemaker manipulates the terroir,” says Havens, who will remain at the winery as its winemaker. “It(terroir) is romantic, (but) self-delusional (to think) that any winemaker doesn’t make decisions. We start to mitigate the terroir, the minute we select the ground, prepare the soil, select rootstocks, select scion material, choose the trellising system … we synthesize the natural sources our vineyards give us into something hopefully pleasing.

“The idea that we can allow the terroir to show through without doing anything is a delusion. The best way to make terroir available is to make careful choices and not be shy about directing the wine.”

It’s no surprise that the spokespeople for ConeTech and Vinovation believe that their methods do not eliminate terroir. “I totally disagree that it negates terroir because a wine from a given origin that has wonderful flavor …,” says ConeTech’s Dann, who then trails off to ask rhetorically, “What is terroir?

“No way do we corrupt, jeopardize, or alter flavor of a wine. I know wine from a specific terroir would taste so much better at (lower alcohol). The presence of excessive alcohol will mask the nuances of the flavor and aroma in wine.”

Bob Kreisher, the director of marketing for Vinovation, is also steadfast in the notion that terroir is not destroyed by RO. He cites as an example a $175 a bottle single-vineyard Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon that his company “adjusted” for its alcohol content.

“It was a wine of place … we didn’t change how the wine tasted. We adjusted the alcohol balance, so that the wine could sing more clearly about the place, the vintage, and the people who made it,” Kreisher says from his office. “To me, these are the principal components of terroir.

But tasting wines which had been dealced by Kreisher’s company, revealed that at different alcohol percentages – even as little as .6 percent – wines tastes differ.

Nonetheless, Kreisher is resolute. “If the Boston Symphony is playing Handel’s Messiah for example, and there’s construction going on outside, are we going to go out and ask them to stop?”

No, Kreisher insists, it’s the people who make the wine. However, he acknowledges, “We’re probably shifting the balance toward the people who make it. We’re giving people more control. We can’t take a Chardonnay from Madera and make it a Kistler or a Montrachet.”

But, by doing what your company is doing, aren’t we getting away from Old World principles?

“That’s true …,” he concedes, “but I don’t think that alcohol adjustment and VA adjustment gets away from that because they’re other winemaking choices.”

Are people then part of terroir?

“You bet,” Kreisher rejoinders. “That’s almost a great part of it. One of my favorite wineries is Navarro and they do something there …It’s the people who do something to make a great wine.”

John Williams of Frog’s Leap in Rutherford, who is a longtime proponent of organic farming and now farms biodynamically, is not averse, however, to dealcing. Although he says doing so is a rare occurrence for him, he has taken some of his wine “over to the spinning cone.” He calls it a “remedial action.”

“As a standard procedure, we would be (against it). But it’s a useful tool when nature deals you a bum hand. You shouldn’t not use something that helps you make a better wine.”

Charles Thomas, the winemaker at Rudd Vineyards in Oakville, has used the SC sparingly for his ’04 and ’05 Cabs. “You don’t want to use it. You’d rather not do those things at all, but the way the harvests played out, we had to do something to give us a balanced wine,” he admits.

Why would you rather not employ it?

“I don’t know if I could give you a solid, scientific reason. But we’re small enough that I haven’t looked at doing a systematic trial,” he says “(But) there’s a certain core belief that the less I do to the wine, the better off it’s going to be – as long as it stays in certain parameters of balance.”

Bill Ballentine, the winemaker for Astrale e Terra on Atlas Peak, has dealced wine, but he’s cautious as well as pragmatic. “Everything has its time and place, I guess,” is the way he puts it. “It’s something I try to avoid. It’s another tool the industry has. … The technology has improved. The quality of dealced wine is a lot better than it ever has been in the past.”

But he says, “I try to make the product as natural as possible. The more voodoo science that gets involved, (the more) it jeopardizes the stability of the product. Wine is a natural product. I’m not a scientist. By trade, I’m a farmer. Nature is what we try to capture here and put it in the bottle. I’m sure everyone’s experimented with it. You’d be pretty naive. There’s a lot of great wines out there that have been dealced. It’s not always a negative thing.”

Are We Creating “Franken-wine”?

Charles Hendricks says the procedure is “kind of the smoke and mirrors that we do so much of in the Napa Valley. What we say and what we do are two different things. … things they don’t want you to know about because people (consumers) don’t know how to process it. They think we’re making Frankenwine. There seems to be a resistance to what we do.

“The trend is to give the people what they want -- sweet wine. … There have been wines that have been dealced in the Wine Spectator’s top 100, but no one wants to talk about it because people have that misunderstanding. It does dumb the fruit down, but if the wine has all the right stuffing, you can blend around it and fix it and have something that’s really nice.”

Hendricks thinks there’s something inherent to Napa Valley’s vineyards which he doesn’t understand and it is that nebulous something that is causing vintners to run to the RO and SC machines in droves.

“There’s something in these hot years that I don’t understand,” he says. “There’s an abundance of stuck fermentations and VA’s are rising. In delayed maturity, there’s something happening in the vines. I think it’s indigenous. Something’s going on there that we don’t know about. So, that’s why you’re seeing a lot of manipulation. (But it’s) a fixing job, rather than true manipulation.”

In the meantime, while dealcoholization seems here to stay in the U.S. and is fast spreading to the rest of the wine world, ConeTech’s Tony Dann itches for the day when the procedure is no longer cloaked behind a scrim.

"I long for the day when things can be said. I believe that day will come,” says Dann, whose company’s Web site boasts that it’s "Reeducating the industry in the merits of flavor management," and is rapidly expanding its purview around the globe. "I crave for our company to stand up and take a bow."

But some might pull out the hook.

~ Alan Goldfarb, Regional Correspondent


To comment on Alan ’s writings and thoughts, contact him at a.goldfarb@appellationamerica.com