The Alcohol Content of Wines Is Too High or Tizwin Makes You Drunk

My wife and I like to get away every once in a while to simply enjoy one another’s company and to experience a place and culture different from our everyday lives. As such we just got back from a week in Napa Valley where we visited and toured some of the best wineries in the world. We had planned the trip well in advance and were able to e-mail or call some very select, hard-to-enter wineries to see if it was possible to meet the owners and wine makers and to tour and taste their wines. We concentrated on smaller, family owned boutique wineries that are nostalgic in nature and which have a long history of winemaking. I must admit that we used our press credentials as an entrée since we plan on doing some follow-up articles as a result of this background research. Whether this was the reason we got entry into some of these vineyards or if the vintners were just nice people, the end result was a week of remarkable lessons and tastings.

While many of these wineries and their owners were remarkable there is one that stood out above all the others – Dunn Vineyards on Howell Mountain in Napa Valley. Christina Dunn, the daughter of the family owned business, invited us to the property. She just received her degree in Viticulture from Cal Poly and knows her stuff both from formal study and practical experience, having grown up on the farm. Her brother, Mike, is taking over the operation of much of the business but the true genius of this winery is Randy Dunn. Randy came to this area in the early 1970s and produced his first vintage in 1979. All told they own about 250 acres in various Napa locations but very few of these acres are planted in vines. In essence, Randy is a farmer who grows grapes and produces some of the best cabernet sauvignon made in the world. They do not employ a winemaker. Randy is the winemaker and still uses time honored techniques of tasting the grapes and determining just from that when to pick various sections of the vineyard. No modern technology guides him along. He seems to know what those who rely on modern techniques don’t know. As such he has become an icon in the wine world whose opinion carries a lot of weight.

Recently Randy became concerned about the state of winemaking. Obviously he goes to many wine events around the valley and at a recent such event he noticed that virtually all of the wines were in excess of 14% alcohol. In fact, they were well above the 14% level where the government taxes the producer more. Most were in the 16%+ range. The net effect of this much alcohol is that after one or two glasses of wine most people are done for the evening. This is not the way wine used to be made. Wines were routinely in the 12-13% range. Randy contends that wines, and especially cabernet sauvignons, are now much stronger because the wine critics who rate wines and write about them in wine magazines like what they refer to as bigger, more tannic and stronger wines. This means wines with higher alcohol content. Thus, to survive in a world full of thousands of wine labels, winemakers have responded by making the wines that these select few critics prefer. If they can get a 90 or higher rating from the wine gurus then they are financially successful. If they don’t, they might as well simply grow grapes to sell to other vintners instead of making the wines themselves because their wines won’t sell as easily nor for as much money. The result is wines in the 16%+ alcohol range.

What would Geronimo have thought about this high alcohol content? It is well know that Apaches liked their alcohol. Theirs wasn’t cabernet sauvignon but a substance called Tizwin. This is what Teaching # 68 in The Leadership Teachings of Geronimo has to say. It’s entitled Tizwin Makes You Drunk, and a Drunk Can’t Lead.

The Apaches drank alcohol. While they loved to indulge in the “white eyes” whiskey, they usually were confined to either tizwin, a type of ale fermented from corn, or mescal, a type of alcohol made from agape. The Apaches liked their alcohol so much that they once almost left the reservation en masse when they were forbidden to make and drink tizwin. This affinity for alcohol cost Geronimo and the Apaches many lives on a number of occasions, because when they drank they tended to overindulge and become careless. While Geronimo was more responsible and judicious that his fellow warriors, he too fell prey to overdrinking at times.

Teaching

We all have our vices, and we all overindulge in one thing or another, but addictive habits can be harmful not only to leaders but also to their organizations and to those they lead. Most things in moderation do no harm, but addictives should be avoided where possible.

It seems that Randy Dunn is taking the lead on reminding an entire industry that too much alcohol is a bad thing. Hopefully, the other winemakers will heed his advice and produce wine that is less alcoholic in content. Whether they do or do not remains to be seen but I do know one thing. Leaders had better learn that followers will not follow drunks, even if the drunk is a good leader when sober. It is a sign of weakness and no one likes to follow someone they know has an obvious weakness. It makes followers cautious of the leader. They don’t know if there are other weaknesses that the leader has that they do not know about and they worry about the judgment of leaders when they are under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This is why leaders who are arrested for DUI or possession of drugs or for other addictive abuses find their names and stories in the next day’s newspapers. Then, no matter what their explanation they have lost credibility with their followers and they have become less effective as a leader.