Category Archives: Learnings

What I’m learning and what I’ve learned.

Acid Part 2- Balance and deliciousness.

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Welcome back to my nerdy rants Acid series.  So last time I bored you with a long blah-blah-blah about the nature of acid in the wine-making process with regards to microbial stability.  This time I’m rambling on about balance.

Balance is a wonderful wine-snob word, it’s up there with the scary words like “complexity” and “nuance”.  It does however, have a very important and real meaning: it means that the astringent and the sweet characteristics of the wine are such that neither over-whelms the other.  Think of soda: ever have flat coke?  Nasty, no?  The carbonation is astringent and it provides balance for the sugar, so without it, the drink just tastes “out of balance”, which I guess is a fancy way of saying it’s gross.  Ever think of sparkling water as hard to drink?  That’s because the astringency from the carbonation has nothing to smooth it out.

Ok, so that’s balance.  Now we have to balance a wine.  So what are the sweet elements and what are the astringent elements?

To the Graph!!!

Sweet Elements                                                           Astringent Elements

Sugar (surprise!)                                                           Acidity

Alcohol                                                                         Tannin

Oak

Polysaccharides (ahhh!  Big word!

Just think of it as fruit flavor from the skins.)

Polyhydric alcohols (I’m not even going to try)

Perfect balance. The fat kid is the sugar, polysaccharides, oak, alcohol and polyhydric alcohols, while the dog is tannin and acid.

Thank you Graph!  So basically, we need to make sure that we have enough sweet elements to make sure the acidity and tannins don’t make the wine harsh, but we need enough astringent elements to add some kick and keep the wine from tasting like flat soda.  Of course, every palate is going to perceive this differently, but that’s the basic idea.

So this makes our case of the Casella adding oodles of acid to the incoming wines pretty self-explanatory.  How did they avoid the wines getting too acidic?  They added plenty of oak, added a small touch of sugar just before bottling, and everything was hunky dorey.  Pretty simple, actually.

Uh-oh, here comes a tangent!

What was especially interesting was the way they treated the higher end wines.  They came in with higher tannin levels and got the same acid treatment.  So I one day was talking to a wine-maker and asked him how they compensated for the acid- sugar?  Not sugar, they just let the “fruit quality” balance it out.

What does that mean?

To me, it has to be the polysaccharides.  In the grape, the pulp is made primarily from water, and the skins, you guessed it, polysaccharides.  If you have a larger skin presence, you have more of said compounds, and it makes sense that they would provide some sweetness elements, giving you a softer, richer wine.  (If you want to hear me REALLY nerd out on this, I’ve got more to the theory, hit me up, I’ve got evidence!)

So that’s it.  That’s acidity and balance in a nutshell.  There’s still a lot to acid, however, for instance, how it affects EVERYTHING!  Stay tuned!

Acid- Part 1- Wine Quality.

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So recently I sat down and tried to write a little bit about what I’ve learned about acid.  So I started writing, and I kept writing and writing, and after more writing, I decided, that no one wants to read a thesis.  So I went ahead and split it into sections, so to start, we’ll initiate the un-initiated.  What exactly is acid?

Acid just sounds scary, doesn’t it?  Tartaric acid just sounds like something you would pour down the drain to unclog it.  Well, I hate to break it to you, but it’s in your wine.

Woah Woah Woah!  Hold it!  Don’t throw your wine collection into the trash.  Ok, that one you already threw in there you can leave in there.  Nobody likes Blackstone anyway.  The thing is grapes naturally have acids in them, namely, Malic acid and Tartaric acid.  Tartaric acid is a natural acid that integrates as seamlessly with your body’s chemistry as does a granny smith apple.  As you may already know, acid in general is a huge part of a wine’s flavor.  It’s the tingling sensation that the wine has on your tongue when you drink it.  It’s an important part of the balance and texture of a wine.  There are many parts of wine that provide subtle sensations of sweetness, so the duty of acid is to differentiate the wine from something like syrup that is just pure sweetness.

When I arrived in Australia, I already knew this.  What I also knew is that acid makes it difficult for microbes to survive.   What I didn’t know was just how effective it was at said goal.

Enter Casella wines.  Unfortunately, I can’t claim that Casella is a particularly clean winery.  The winery moves through thousands of tons of grapes every day and there’s not always time to do a thorough cleaning between every lot.  There is a lot of grime and junk that ends up in the tanks and well, let’s be honest, this isn’t exactly, err… sterile.

I can tell you this was something of a shock to me, because well, everywhere I’ve been before, they’ve been pretty adamant about sanitation.  Sanitation is your first defense against microbial instability, and protecting against all sorts of spoilage flavors in your wine.  However, after tasting through the lots with the wine-makers, I can tell you there was never any sign of microbial spoilage, which I thought was weird, because I definitely saw hoses that if I touched, I wouldn’t eat with my hands later.

So why is Casella wine so stable when it goes through the muck like this?  Well, it’s that stuff you were about to pour down the drain- acid.  The wine-makers make it a point to keep the acids very low, (pH of 3.5 and lower for the hard-core nerds in the audience) they add very large doses of Tartaric acid when the fruit comes in, so much so they have a tank full of the stuff automatically dosing our Drain-O into the transport lines and apparently, that coupled with normal SO2 levels, makes this stuff super-wine.  In wine-making school they teach you that acid is a microbial deterrent, a kind of microbiological crime-fighter and they even talk about it in some consumer-oriented wine books, but not until I had seen it here did I really appreciate how strong it is.  This is simply amazing: the wine here protects itself, unlike every American winery I’ve been to, where the wine-makers protect the wine.

Ok, ok, so you guys are probably wondering the same thing I did: doesn’t all that acid make the wine tart?  Of course it can, but it’s more a question of balancing it with other elements of the wine, which we’ll get to another day.

So there you have it.  Acidity.  If you made it this far, congrats!  I probably shouldn’t have chosen one of the most important topics in the wine world for an article subject, but here you are, you made it.  So kudos to you!  If I didn’t bore you enough just now and you want to hear more self-important diatribes, stay tuned!

 

Knowing Who’s Boss

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So it’s fruit finding time!  I am normally something of a fruit vulture, hanging around vineyards, hoping that something gets dropped or doesn’t get sold, but this year I’m going to try to find something ahead of time.  As much fun as the “set up for harvest in 24 hours” game is, I’m going to go about things in hopefully a more professional manner this year.  So as I start hunting for Zinfandel and Pinot Noir lots for fall, I find myself thinking about last year’s harvest.

Stop me if you’ve ever heard this one before: to make great wine you need great fruit.  Not exactly a revolutionary concept, is it?  It’s kinda up there with “the most important part of a steak is the meat”.  (I’m waiting to hear that in a steakhouse someday)  Well, as a winemaking/enology student, you kinda lose track of this sometimes, because as a winemaker, you have so many tools at your disposal to alter how the wine tastes, many of which I’ve discussed here, that you begin to forget the importance of fruit in the first place.

So let’s flash back to September 2011, shall we?  My buddy Alex calls me up to tell me he’s getting married right before I bring in a lot of under-ripe, light-bodied Pinot.  (for the non-nerds: light-bodied means thin and soft, like comparing skim milk to full-cream)  I decide to make the wine for his wedding, and I ask him what type of wines he likes.  The answer: bold, smooth wines, in other words, the opposite of what I have. (for the non-nerds- he likes that full cream I mentioned earlier)

Thinking myself an other-worldly wine-wizard, I began to under-take turning apples into oranges.  I take my under-ripe, light-bodied Pinot fruit and nuke it with every extractive method I can think of.  I oak it heavily during fermentation with toasted and untoasted oak.  I add sulfur mid-fermentation to create the silky compound glycerol.  I drain juice from the wine to get more skin contact.  I punch down as much as I can.  I add extracting enzymes.  What did all of this do?  My under-ripe light Pinot came out tasting like…

(We’re doing that suspense thing again)

…an under-ripe light Pinot.

Well…  Dammit.

So if there’s a lesson to learn here: it’s pretty obvious.  Learn who’s boss.  The fruit is going to taste the way it is going to taste.  All you winemakers just have to deal with it.  That’s not to say I didn’t find ways to beef it up, blending with Zinfandel did wonders for it, as did a little post-fermentation oak.  However, I think it’s important for me to share with anyone who reads my little blurbs about how wine-makers make wines taste different ways understand one thing:

We winemakers can alter in subtle ways how a wine tastes, and there are even occasions when the wine-maker can make a big affect on the flavor of the wine, but at the end of the day, it’s the fruit who’s boss.

Closing time 2.0- big winery work

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Ok, so here I am, sitting in a train station in Cootamundra, (why don’t we have names in the U.S. like Cootamundra?  I love these people!) thinking about everything.  Thinking about home, what makes home home, what I want home to be, thinking about Australia, thinking about the future and thinking about wine.  I also am thinking that I haven’t written in this blog for a while.  Suffice to say things have been eventful on this side of the world, with a  trip to Melbourne, closing in on making a decision as to where I will be next vintage, (either going to be working in Russian River Valley, Napa Valley or Sonoma Valley) and being en route to a trip to Sydney, Osaka, Bangkok and Singapore.  However, if you want to hear about that, you’ll have to give me a ring or something.

 

So I guess this is a good time to tell you about Casella wines: the real dirt of the issue.  Casella wines makes wines in a dramatic and factory-like manner.  Some of the things they do seem down-right alien, and through-out the process, the chain of command is long enough that by the time it reaches the worker at the bottom the wine itself, the wine seems like just red stuff that it’s our job to process as if it were oil in a refinery.  The fact of the matter is because of the sheer volume of wine and the gross size of the winery, it doesn’t make sense to make wine the same way we do in another winery.  You can’t drain a tank, then hop in and shovel out the tank when there’s 200 tons of grapes in the tank.  So what we do is we hop on top and shoot down wine like firemen with powerful hoses to make a muck we can pump out.  It seems ridiculous, but it’s just the reality of this volume.  Even transferring a tank is a day-long operation, setting up lines that stretch some ½ mile long to get from one 1,100,000 (look at all the pretty zero’s!) liter tank to another.

 

It was definitely a positive learning experience nonetheless, however.  I’m learning that every winery in the world is going to do things differently, and I’m learning to roll with it.  Stone Hill made wine one way, Fresno State another, and now, Casella another.  It makes sense, as it allows them to make wine cheaply, and spend more money on grape quality (or not, depending on the product), but it’s not for me.  The wine-makers here have their hands somewhat tied.  You can’t take a risk with a million liter tank, you have to play it safe, and being careful and gentle isn’t really an option here, the processes here are not of the wine-maker’s design, rather, they are pre-set to handle large quantities of wine quickly and efficiently. 

 

That’s not to say that there aren’t good wines being made here, there most certainly are, especially the wines that came from the Riverina before the rains in March, but the biggest reason things here aren’t for me is the lack connection with the wine.  I think one of the romantic and fun things about wine is the intimacy: the experience of watching a wine grow into something beautiful.  The feeling of making something gorgeous is what drives any creative person to create, but here the watching is casual, and the beauty, well, let’s be honest, this is bulk wine…

Rain, Rain, Go Away

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It’s safe to say that rain is bad for wine-grapes.  Grape-growers fear it like I feared that big kid with anger issues in middle school.  That is why it’s been so wonderful that Australia has experienced an unexpected Monsoon season right in the middle of harvest.  The rain has been long and over-whelming, pouring heavily on us for days.  We’ve been missing work waiting on the rain and even though it finally ended Sunday, the dam in the local area is so loaded up with water it’s ruptured and today we had to be evacuated from the winery to avoid the incoming floods.  (I’d tell you more, but they didn’t tell us much in the first place, and there are no local news stations out here)

So it’s not actually raining this hard.

With all this drama over water, water and more water, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and reading deeper into what I know about rain. The issue with rain is very simple: it promotes rot and it promotes fruit bloating.  We’ll tackle those one at a time.

Rot.  Sounds pretty gnarly, doesn’t it?  The thing is when your apples at home go rotten, you throw them out.  However, if you are making wine in the Napa Valley and it rains, not making wine that year is not really an option, so what happens is the grapes arrive in the winery and the winemaker and the fruit begin to wage war.  Besides just being icky, the rot impacts almost every aspect of the wine- it releases a small army of enzymes that start processes the winemaker simply doesn’t want to see happen.  These enzymes negatively affect color, fruit aromas and also make the wine oxidize more easily.  The rot itself (which is really just mold) actually eats up much of the acid and the nutrients in the grape needed for yeast and to boot, it releases lots of vinegar producing microbes.  …wow, that was a long list of bad things.  This is why wine-makers hate rain, and the closer to harvest you are, the more damage it does.

They call it the Noble rot, but it’s usually not so noble…

Bloating.  No, we’re not talking about how you feel after a few too many hot-dogs.  This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: the fruit fills up with water.  This means you lose sugar concentration as well as concentration in general.  During most of the season, growers will often intentionally with-hold water to increase concentration, so when the rain comes, it undoes a lot of the work the grower has been trying to do.

So here we are in Australia, picking up the scraps after Monsoon Season 2012.  Hopefully, we can salvage a vintage after this.  The weather after rains makes a big impact on what grows on the vine.  Unfortunately, it’s not our decision what happens from here on out, it’s just up to the weather.

*Hard-core wine nerd note- Rot does have one positive note- it promotes the metabolism of polyhydric alcohols or “sugar alcohols”, which is a terrifying name for equally scary-named glycerol, mannitol, erythritol (I’m hoping I never have to pronounce that one out loud), arabitol, sorbitol, xylitol and myo-inositol.  Although mannitol has a little of a bad rap, generally, these compounds (especially glycerol) are purported to provide a soft sweetness with a round-ness on the palate and fuller mouth-feel.

*Personal note- did anyone understand the hard-core wine nerd note?

Viva Italia

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So Italian wine is a little, err… different.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing them to my mom’s favorite asparagus recipes (love you, mom!) but there’s no denying that Italian wine-making often times accomplishes a different set of goals than California wine-making.  For those that don’t know, Italian, as well as most European wines- French wine especially, are known for higher acids and less alcohol, but just as much- more earthy flavors as opposed to fruity flavors, as well as less body than American wines.  These attributes have always been ascribed as positive characteristics if you enjoy the style, because they develop wines that age well and compare to American wines in flavor much the same way coffee does to fruit juice.  (Ok, that’s not really fair, cuz I love coffee WAY more than fruit juice)

I always figured this was because French and Italian winemakers just have different goals than we Americans.  Sommeliers definitely seem to.  They go nuts over wild yeast smells and other “old world” smells.  I figured someday I’d have to make a trip to Europe and see how the old-school of wine does it.  But then I moved to Australia, and I met Edoardo and Niccolo.

I have to say, I love these guys, they are intensely passionate about what they do, are deeply compassionate, love gastronomy, are kind, giving and so endearingly Italian their accents would embarrass a Super Mario.  As interesting as they are culturally, they are both talented and brilliant Italian wine-makers.  Edoardo is the most outspoken of the group, and when we started talking about our different wine-making philosophy, something he is not shy about, I expected it to be like something out of one a mid-90’s Jackie Chan film, a humorous mis-match of characters.  (I also like to imagine that we would fight crime together)  But what surprised me, actually, what shocked me, was how similar we were.

This is what it feels like I every time I come over.  It’s AWESOME!  The guys are great hosts.

So far, Eduardo, Niccolo and I have gotten together and exchanged meals from our home countries, they’ve made traditional Italian dishes, and I’ve made, well, hot dogs.  This week it’s burgers.  We’ve sat and we’ve talked wine.  It’s amazing to me how the Italian palate likes the gentle fruitiness of plums and berries of Shiraz as much if not more than I do, and that they are more forgiving of prominent alcohol than I am (that really surprised me) and so far, we’ve liked the same wines.  I’ve also noticed that all that wine funk that we American winemakers look at in disgust (such as sulfur off-flavors, spoilage yeast and oxidation) they look on with equal disgust.  When talking about Brettanomyces, Edoardo wrinkles his nose, sneers, and shakes his head a lot, a much more honest version of what I would say about the same thing.

The one difference that I have noticed between them and myself is a taste for acid.  As an American wine-maker, the primary goal of acid use is just to make sure you don’t confuse my wine with grape-juice.   For them, however, it is a mandatory necessity, and they seem to enjoy it flavor-wise.  Having your acid right makes the process of wine-making go a lot easier, but American wine-makers seem more willing to wrestle with the problems of lower acids than do the Italians (and the Australians, for that matter).  I think what I’ve probably learned here is that the Italian palate is very open-minded, that fruity smells are every much as enjoyable to the Italian winemaker as is a dark, earthy red.  Also, I would guess that there is a relationship between the open-minded-ness towards acid and a different perception of wines that some Americans might find austere.  There may be less need for fruit and the “sweetness” derived from higher alcohols, high levels of oak and other natural poly-saccharides (scary word!  just means stuff it the grape that gives sweet taste) when you have more of a appreciation for acid.

Maybe next time I see them (hopefully soon!) we should have a toast to acid!

R to the Peezy- Episode 1

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Winemaking has a number of white elephants in the field of research.  There are constantly new things we have never thought about, but there is one subject my greatest professor Dr. Ken Fugelsang would constantly extoll as the hidden secret, the force, the excaliber of winemaking.  He said that if you were to get an “A” in his class, this was the one thing you absolutely had to understand.

In talking with winemakers in the future, I would find that yes, this is a subject of massive consequence and little understanding.

It’s really important and mysterious.

I’m intentionally not telling you what it is for build-up.

OK! OK!  I didn’t mean to annoy you!

Reductive potential, there, I said it.  But what is reductive potential?  (By the way, doesn’t “reductive potential” sounds scary?  From here on out, let’s call it R-P.)  This is the deep end of winemaking science.  Unfortunately, I can’t describe this in purely lay-man’s terms, so we’re going to have to get a little science-y here: reductive potential is the ability of the wine to add electrons/hydrogen atoms to molecules in solution.  Don’t worry, that’s as science-y as we’re going to get.  The issue is that this ability has far-reaching consequences on the wine.

AHHHH!!!! CHEMISTRY!!!!

The first and foremost consequence is flavor.  It’s a pretty simple concept, all the flavors in the wine are the result of lots and lots of types of little molecules, chemicals that react with our senses.  The issue is that if you add or remove a hydrogen atom, they change character, and maybe they don’t react with your senses anymore, or maybe molecules that didn’t now do.  This means that the R-P is going to dictate how active different sets of flavor chemicals are.

This is where things get crazy.  This means to some degree, the flavors of the wine are not a product of the fruit.  (Oh snap!)  Or to be more specific, the way the flavors of the grape are expressed is very much in the hands of the wine-maker.  R.P is a product of the acidity of a wine, the amount of poly-phenols (a chemical group that mouth-drying chemicals belong to) and the amount of sulfur dioxide, as well as other anti-oxidants that may have developed in the wine.  The winemaker can add or remove all of these components at will, with a gamut of things he can add.

However, that’s all I know, and R.P. has far-reaching consequences: pretty much everything we as wine-makers do will have an impact on R.P., so the things we do to the wine won’t only have the intended effect, but also secondary effects due to the change in R.P.

As I advance as a winemaker, I may be able to say more about this.  And hopefully I’ll be a good enough a writer to explain it clearly, but as this cutting edge of the field unfolds in front of me, maybe someday I’ll be grasp it a little more entirely.  This is just a synopsis, but unfortunately, it’s all I’ve got in this young stage of my career.

So you wanna be a winemaker, huh?

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So you want to be a winemaker, huh?  It’s not hard to imagine that winemaking is a great job.  Even though it may not be the sitting on hilltops swirling wine glasses some people imagine, the fact of the matter is that this is an amazing field.  We get to make art and its art you can both see, taste and smell.  We work in the most beautiful parts of the world and we get to partake in an industry that truly appreciates the joys of life.

I have no idea who this guy is, but isn’t it a romantic picture?
 

So how does one become a winemaker?  I’d be lying if I said there was only one way into the industry.  There are multitudes.  However, there are some paths to the top that are a little more commonly tread than others and for the sake of simplicity, I will introduce what I perceive to be the most common path in the United States.

So let’s say you do what many winemakers, including myself have done- you try to find a career, and you can’t find anything you like.  You’re a twenty-something, and this whole wine-making thing seems to the ticket.  The first step to becoming a winemaker is to get an education.  The most established schools for winemaking are the famous UC-Davis and the not-so-famous Fresno State.  The purpose of the degree is simple: get you a technical understanding of what you’re doing.  Winemakers are scientists, monitoring and working with microbes of various sorts and massaging chemicals already present in the wine to make something beautiful, so knowing what those microbes and chemicals are is step one.

Step Two is to get some experience.  Every harvest, winery workforces inflate like balloons and there is a great demand for the first job most winemakers have in the field: interns.  The lowly intern is the grunt, the tank cleaning monkey and the gopher of the winery.  However, there is always so much work to be done in the winery that the intern eventually gets to see everything and its valuable experience in the field of winemaking.  Young winemakers usually have to work several internships before they can get to step three.

Step Three is to work underneath someone.  Once you’ve amassed plenty of experience working harvests at the lowest level, you’re ready to handle a little responsibility.  Most winemakers get hired on as assistant winemakers, the head wine-maker’s right-hand man and No. 2, as an Enologist, a winemaker specializing in managing the lab or cellar master, the man in charge of getting the daily work of wine-making done.  Step 3 usually lasts the longest because…

Step 4 is hard to attain.  Step 4 is to become head winemaker, and there are very few of these positions available.  There are lots of people at Step 3 jockeying for this position.  Step 4 is about luck and timing as much as anything else, but that’s how you become a head winemaker at a winery.

At the end of the day, it can take winemaking professionals 10-20 years to go from the bottom to the top, and it’s more than some people have patience for.  It’s not a career we winemakers do because we think we can make money, or because we think we can rise through the ranks quickly, or because it’s easy.  We do it because we love it, and for many of us, we couldn’t imagine doing anything else with our lives.  For one reason or another, winemaking is our passion.  Call us artists, call us dreamers, call us stubborn, call us what you want, but whatever it is that makes us do this, it’s what makes us all winemakers.

Getting a Little Skin

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So it seems to me that there are a lot of fun facts that float around the world: 70% of your body is water, most of your body heat is lost through your head, 80% of people believe they’re above-average drivers, etc…  And I think a few float around the wine world, todays example: red wine gets all its flavor from the skins.  Of course, it wouldn’t be a fun fact if there wasn’t a lot of truth to that and to be honest, where the flavors of the wine come from within the grape could be an article all it’s own, but today I want to talk about one thing: Extended Maceration.

So what is an Extended Maceration?  The idea is stupidly simple.  Let the wine soak in the skins longer after fermentation.  The logic of this seems pretty simple, right?  If the skins are the source of the flavor, more contact with the skins should result in better extraction of the flavor.  But if it’s so simple, than why doesn’t every winemaker do this process?  There has to be a reason.

At Fresno State, my professors and mentors gave me a variety of theories on this subject.  The big problem was that they seemed to conflict and I have yet to work at a winery that employs this technique, so I have yet to see the results first-hand.  The first thing to understand, however, is that the red wine doesn’t get its entire flavor from the skins.  (don’t tell your local tour guide that, their head may explode) While the skins provide a lot of elements to the wine, their primary contribution to the wine is color and textural components.

So confusing theory #1 is that since the tannins (read molecules in wine that cause texture and mouth-drying effect) are largely localized in the skins, by doing a little skin-soak, we can get more tannin into the wine.  Again, pretty simple concept, so the tannins should be extra intense as a result of this process, no?

Cue confusing theory #2: extended maceration is supposed to soften the wine.  What?  What happened to intensifying tannins?  Now the wine is getting softer, isn’t that the opposite of what we were talking about?  Apparently this theory is supposed to what I affectionately call “tannin-balls” in which the tannins clump up into big balls that roll over the tongue and create texture without creating overtly intense amounts of mouth-drying.  (In chemistry tannin-balls are actually called “polymerized complexes” of tannin and are basically big snow-flakes of connected tannin molecules, but for me, it’s easier to think of them as big balls of tannin that roll over the tongue)  Ok, so is the wine softening with tannin-balls, or is the tannin increasing in intensity?

Confusing theory #3: as the wine sits with the skins, it often is sitting with the seeds as well.  With time the alcohol can eat away at the seeds causing them to release bitterness and astringency.  Ok.  This just isn’t fair.  So the wine is getting more tannic and bitter, but now it’s getting bitter?  What’s going on?

Unfortunately, before leaving Fresno State, I never got a chance to put all these theories together, and even during my first and second harvests, I never got to see us put this technique to work, so there I was, stupefied, trying to make sense of this conflicting information.  However, I did eventually get my epiphany, and it came in the form of a line for gumbo.

Michael Eddy, the head premium Cabernet maker for Gallo was standing behind me in line for Gumbo at the Gallo Harvest Party, and I decided to ask him about these theories.

Apparently the tannin-ball theory is correct.  As Michael explained, extended maceration tends to soften the wine, but it’s not so simple.  Aromatically, it creates darker flavors, reducing fresh fruit and creating more earth tones.  However, it takes a little of time before it starts to show any positive effect.  At first, much like a teenager, the wine goes through a phase in which it’s hard to like and generally unpleasant, but like a teenager, after a little time, the wine begins to mellow out and improve.  However, if an extended maceration goes for too long, it can get bitter.  (It must be the seeds!)

This makes a lot of sense.  For any international wine fanatics who may be reading this, extended maceration is common practice for the grape Nebbiolo, which has lots of tannin to soften and is known for its earthier flavors.  Michael actually went as far as to say he didn’t like the technique, but it’s part of the winemaker’s paintbrush, and I’m excited to know more about it.
Update- 10/14/2012- The winemakers at Donelan are believers in confusing theory #1 and in the short-term winery results, it appears to be true, at least for concentrated Pinot Noir fruit.  Still not sold that theories #2 and #3 are completely wrong, truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

A Little Love for Dirt (but just a little)

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So it stands to reason that if half of a vine is underground, that ground will probably have some sort of influence on the wine: does it not?  It especially makes sense when you consider how much one vineyard site can vary from the next.  I personally work at a winery where we make a series of wines from specific vineyards, often right next to each other and they often have a flavor that is totally different from one another.  So what gives?  You can’t blame the climate, the vineyards are one hill away from each other.  It has to be the soil, right?

Well, maybe it is.  But for what it’s worth, they’re not teaching us that’s the reason at winemaking school nowadays.  This mystical power of soils that I had heard that wine “experts” talk about is exactly what I expected to learn about when I began a class called “Soils 101”.  I walked in with open eyes, waiting for the professor to start telling me about how clay will give you more cherry in Pinot Noir and limestone gives you more minerality in whites.  But alas, my dreams did not come true.

Instead, they taught us about the make-up of soil, the build-up of soils and the polar charges of the soil particles.  I’m sure this is where your mouse is starting to slowly rove towards the “minimize” button in the corner, but stop it!  Don’t let it get away!  Everything I learned in that class boiled down to one simple fact about soil as it pertains to wine.  One fact that defines how soil impacts the eventual fruit the vine produces.

(Drumroll)

(I’m gunna let this build up a little bit more)

(Ready yet?)

Soil is a water and nutrient reservoir for the vines.  As a vineyard manager, it’s your job to make sure you react to the soil, so you don’t get too much or two little of water or any nutrient so the vine grows ok.  Each nutrient is like a box that needs to be checked so that your vines grow correctly.  Magnesium?  Check.  Phosphorous?  Check.  And so on.  I don’t know about you, but I found this to be one of the most disappointing lessons the Enology (winemaking) program had to offer.  It pretty much smashed all my preconceptions of wine being an expression of the soil with a steel hammer.

So there you have it.  In enology school, it is not taught that soil affects flavor.  Of course, when I thought about it, I couldn’t help but deconstruct that argument a little bit.  If it were true that soil’s primary involvement in the vine’s growth and the fruit’s development was as a pantry where the vine could go and source sustenance when it needed it, it would stand to reason that climate, canopy management, fruit load and clonal material would be the only factors to determine wine quality.  However, a fact that most wine professionals accept as a given is that within every vineyard there is fruit of varying qualities.

So soil has to do something.  What does it do exactly, though?  One of my professors, Dr. Jim Kennedy did a study on this.  He took a look at a vineyard in Oregon and picked two blocks (sections) that produced very different quality fruit.  Then he took a look at the soil underneath.  What did he find?  The soil in the higher quality block retained less water.

So is water the smoking gun of soil science?  I’m starting to think so.  Dr. Kennedy’s work wasn’t the only piece of evidence I’d seen, I had read in a different wine textbook a similar finding by a researcher in France.  It makes sense.  If the soil retains less water than you get less growth in the vine, and as a general rule, that tends to develop better concentration in the fruit.  In one of our viticulture classes we were shown a process called RDI- Regulated Deficit Irrigation, in which the vineyard manager carefully restricts the amount of the water the vineyard gets to increase fruit quality, and it seems to have been working for a long time.  Do soils with low water availability have the ability to do this naturally?  So it seems.

But before we mark this case closed, I have one observation.  In soils and viticulture class, we talked about all the different nutrients the vine requires in the wine-making process: Iron, Nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphorous, Calcium, Magnesium, Zinc… …the list is almost as long as the list of nutrients our human body needs.  Like the human body, the vine’s soil cannot be deficient in any of these, nor can it be taken in toxic levels.  However, in the case of the vine, wouldn’t it stand to reason that a vineyard with a slightly higher iron content in the soil have a slightly different flavor than a similar vineyard with a lower iron content?

It’s an idea.  I hope it’s a good one.