Tag Archives: Grapes

Knowing Who’s Boss

Posted on by
1

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.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Posted on by
4

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?