It's not your imagination. Wine really has gotten boozier.
In the past two decades the maximum alcohol content of wine has crept up from about 13 percent to, in some cases, northward of 17 percent, a side effect of the growing popularity of wines with richer fruit flavor. The intoxication inflation has gotten so bad that wine scientists have begun to bioprospect for wild yeasts that turn a smaller quantity of the sugar in grape juice into alcohol during fermentation than does the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae—humanity’s partner in inebriation for thousands of years—but which can still produce a fine, finished wine.
Image: Australian Shiraz-viognier wine. Credit: Tristan Kenney/Wikimedia Commons
To read the original article: Wine Becomes More Like Whisky as Alcohol Content Gets High - Scientific American
