Thomas Cottrell is Bellevue Club’s wine consultant and the owner of La Cantina Wine Merchants.
Don’t let this scare you off, but there’s a lot of mathematics permeating the world of wine. Not a great deal of calculus, perhaps (except for the lab technicians); but quite a lot of numbers. It starts with the vintage, moves on to the alcohol level and stretches into things like “85 percent cabernet sauvignon, 10
percent merlot, and 5 percent cabernet franc.” Stuff like that. And there’s more, as they say on late-night TV. “Aged in oak barrels for 24 months; one-third new, two-thirds used; one-half French Limousin, one-half American.” If you’re not careful it can get pretty tedious, very quickly. But here are a few numbers that may intrigue you ... things to consider the next time you sit down with a glass of wine. Consider the glass of wine itself. It might have four, five or six ounces of wine in it, depending on the size of the glass and how full you’ve filled it. In better restaurants these days, it is not uncommon to have a six-ounce pour, about one-quarter of a bottle. Let’s assume you’re in such a restaurant (or at least a good household): six ounces will be our standard. That means that your glass of wine is one forty-eighth of a case of wine. It is also one of 1,180 glasses of wine held in a standard barrel of wine. The barrel held 740 pounds of grapes, which means that your glass is the distillation of six-tenths of a pound of grapes—about 10 ounces by weight.
Another way to look at that barrel is that it is the equivalent of 59 gallons. It also holds nearly 25 cases of wines—24.6 to be precise. (Detour: a new French oak barrel can cost $900 these days. If a winemaker decides to use 100 percent new oak on all her wines, it means that for each barrel—300 bottles—$3 is added to the manufactured cost of the wine. By the time that wine reaches the retail shelf, the oak component alone will add at least $7 to the price; $10 is probably a better estimate. How much do you like oak on your wine?) Here are more metrics for you to evaluate that glass of wine. Remember that every wine-growing region in the
world has a different crop yield (as does every individual vineyard, of course). The yield is ex-pressed as “tons per acre,” which probably sounds pretty boring until you realize that it generally affects the concentration, quality ... and the price of the wine. Take Sonoma County in California. On average, an acre of grapes there produces five tons of grapes; or, put another way, 13.5 barrels of wine. In turn, that’s 15,940 glasses of wine. Compare that with Washington state, which averages less than four tons per acre. Turn an acre’s production here into glasses of wine and you get 12,400—3,540 fewer glasses produced on the same amount of real estate. Imagine what that does to the concentration and focus of an average glass of wine, even if you ignore the cost factor. And who among us doesn’t pay attention to that? Don’t get me wrong, there are other things besides tons-per-acre to explain the difference between great wine, good wine, and average (or worse) wine. But it is interesting to see the general correlations that occur. Consider, for example, the state of California.
The average yield for the state as a whole is just under six tons (per acre)—think of all that jug wine. As we’ve seen, Sonoma County averages five. But famous—and famously expensive—Napa Valley comes in at less than two and three-quarters. Now you know one of the reasons why your favorite cabernet from down there costs as much as it does: just 8,703 glasses per acre, including the white wines. How about another glass of Opus One? Here’s one last number for you, one that has no bearing on quality but that’s interesting nonetheless. In comparing California with Washington state, we can argue these days that our wines are every bit as impressive as theirs—it’s now a matter of taste, not of quality. But on the quantity side of things, the one where we’re the second-largest
producer of wine in the country? Remember this: for every glass of wine produced in the state of Washington, our friends to the south churn out 27. It’s going to take a little while to change those numbers.
