Alcohol Content of Wine

I am working on a new Riesling wine made from California grapes, and it is time to balance the sugar level and pick the alcohol content.

Most people would have no way of knowing, but my blog page that gets the most traffic is this table on alcohol content of wines that I put in months ago.

Here is a link to another one from http://www.alcoholcontents.com/wine/wine.htm.  I don't like it because it is far too vague.  The lesson is that regular white wines like Chardonnay and Riesling are at 10% for medium and 11.5% alcohol by volume for dry. Medium red wines start at 11% and go to 12%.  Dry reds are 12-14%.  Hardy deep reds can be as high as 17%. The author says that Shiraz and Syrah which are the same grape, have different alcohol content when made in the Australlian style (Shiraz) than in the French/California style (Syrah) -- not sure how believable that is.

Analytical work on wines show that the alcohol content on the label is almost always over reported. It would be smart to subtract 1% from all of them.

There are many ways to measure alcohol content, and about the simplest is distillation. Industrially, GC and a this Anton Paar flow-through densitometer are used. Jean Jacobson wrote  an in-depth segment in a monograph on Amazon. Another good link on alcohol measurement.