Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
12
The Wine
Country: A
Closer Look
by Jason Cochran, Erika Lenkert & John Thoreen
HOW WINE IS MADE
It sounds so simple: Harvest ripe grapes, pour some yeast in the juice, let it fer-
ment into wine, clarify and age the result, and drink.
But making wine is much more complex than that. From arguing about the
very meaning of
ripe
to controlling the ferment in order to subtly tweak flavors,
the contemporary winemaker incorporates deep knowledge of fermentation, soils,
and microbiology; the University of California, Davis, even offers graduate
degrees in viticulture and enology. The issue of personal taste further complicates
the scientific process.
On your tours of wineries, you'll hear differing stories about the “right” way
to make wine, because each vintner harbors strong opinions—their way is usually
presented as the right way—on wine styling. Be prepared for some inconsisten-
cies justified by long-winded tales of tradition, and gird yourself to be over-
whelmed by minutiae. If you don't prepare yourself with a little background
knowledge, the wine culture runs the risk of becoming tedious. It's a major rea-
son some laymen accuse the wine world of pretentiousness. To help you sort
through the claims, and to have a greater appreciation of what you'll hear, here's
a brief but broad sketch of the ABCs of making white wines, red wines, and
sparkling wines.
WHITE WINES
For white wines, the winemaker wants only the juice from the grapes. (For red
wines, both the juice and the skins of the grapes are essential; using the white
winemaking technique, you can make a
white
wine from a
red-skinned grape.
)
Grapes are picked either by hand or by machine and brought to the winery as
quickly as possible. Just as a sliced apple turns brown when left on the kitchen
counter, grapes oxidize—and can even start fermenting—if they aren't processed
quickly. At some wineries, the clusters go through a “destemmer-crusher,” which
pops the berries off their stems and breaks them open (not really crushing them).
The resulting mixture of juices, pulp, and seeds—called
must
—is pumped to a
press. At other wineries, the whole clusters are put directly into a press (a widely
used technique called, logically,
whole-cluster pressing
). When Lucy Ricardo
stomped grapes in an open vat, she was using an ancient method to accomplish
this post-harvest step of the process.
Most presses these days use an inflatable membrane, like a balloon, and gen-
tly use air pressure to separate the skins from the juice, which is then pumped into
