Sep
3
by John Kelly in wine
Winemakers love to gripe that Pinot Noir is the hardest wine to make. I disagree. It is not that it is difficult to make; Pinot Noir is difficult to get right. First, if you are not starting with good grapes you might as well pack it in. Americans don’t like to be told this, but all vineyards are NOT created equal. And great Pinot vineyards are scarce on the ground, at least as much so in America as in Burgundy (where less than 10% of the Pinot Noir acreage is designated grand cru). Second, not all winemakers are temperamentally suited to make Pinot. During the winemaking process, Pinot Noir punishes ego. Winemakers who must put their personal stamp on every wine they make invariably make bad Pinot, because tinkering with the process or “fixing” what appear to some winemakers as “problems” just does not work with this grape.
I’m not saying that I’m some sort of Pinot genius — far from it. In fact I believe there can be no such thing — the best Pinot winemaker I can hope to be is some sort of zen-state idiot savant. By practicing this approach to making Pinot for the last decade-plus, I have come up with a few do’s and don’ts. Do start with a good vineyard. Don’t pick the grapes overripe. Do pick when the seeds are ripe. Do treat the fruit gently. Don’t do the whole berry/carbonic maceration thing (in my view, a method that makes Beaujolais, not Pinot). Do make any additions the fruit needs at the crusher. Do wait for the cap to rise on its own (some winemakers call this a “cold soak”). Don’t ferment uninoculated – there is nothing more certain to destroy Pinot than having to “fix” a stuck fermentation. Don’t pump the wine over the cap. Do punch down. Don’t punch down too much. Do let the wine “rest” for a while after fermentation before pressing. Don’t do extended maceration.
It is this last point that had me in a state of cognitive dissonance during the 2005 harvest. The protocol I have developed over the years is to maintain the wine in fermenter for a total of 14 days of cuvaison. For reasons related to the timing demands of the 2005 harvest, the move to the new winery, and delays in receiving new equipment, all my ’05 Pinot Noir lots spent substantially longer than 14 days in fermenter: 19, 22, 27, 28 and 29 days to be precise. And I was sorely afraid.
BUT – so far this has not proven to be a disaster. The ’05 wines in fact are marvelous. Whether they are marvelous because of — or in spite of — the long maceration times will never be known. I have no plans to deliberately incorporate long maceration into my Pinot protocols. Perhaps some day in the future I will have the resources to do an experiment on the effects of long maceration on Pinot. Until then I plan to do my best to keep maceration times near two weeks. But at least I have learned that I don’t have to stress out over not getting the Pinot pressed off at exactly fourteen days. That, at least, is a bit of a relief.
This post originally appeared on John Kelly’s blog: “notes from the winemaker.” John Kelly is the owner and winemaker of Westwood wines, Sonoma, California.
Aug
27
by Louis Nel in wine
We are taught the benefits of protein stabilization of wines, and accept it as fact. We believe because we are told to. Then sometimes along our wine journey, a suspicion creeps in, we have never seen this “haze” formed by protein instability, is this just another Father Christmas story, one that cannot be true? Like any religion, winemaking has stages, and one sometimes does some church hopping to find the right way of doing things.
When I was a young bright-eyed winemaker, straight out of university, I got excited whenever I met a well-known winemaker. They were my rock stars, and I wanted to be one. What makes them so special, what can I learn, what wisdom can I glean from their fertile minds? I would seek the answer, and go to the mountain and climb it, to find my guru.
At this time I met some of the most decadent rock stars, who told me that adding too much bentonite is just plain evil. It is a conspiracy of the bentonite magnates, who have underground meetings and want to sell tons of the stuff to the masses (this bit I just made up). Bentonite just strips wine, and should be used in very conservative amounts. The recipe the gods gave me was, whatever the lab says, add half of it. If the bentonite requirement was 80g/hℓ, add only 40g/hℓ. I came down from the mountain, and applied this wisdom for a very short while, because I finally found the haze that my lecturers taught me about. Luckily it was a very small run, and did not mean the financial ruin of my boss, but from then on I was a much safer winemaker. I was cured from following gurus for a long time.
There are lots of things that we are taught that we just accept as fact. Most of them are too dangerous to try and disprove, so we might never know the truth. At the other end of the spectrum there are people who get away with bad winemaking practices, because they have a cool cellar, have wine that is not prone to pinking, have a naturally low bacteria count in their wines, have naturally low Brett counts and other blessings. The impact of moving to another cellar where things are not the same as at home, can, however, be disillusioning.
Count your blessings, because you do not know, what it is you don’t know.
Aug
20
by Louis Nel in wine
Cold stabilisation of wine is one of those things that is very difficult to determine. When is a wine stable, and under which circumstances is it stable? The method used to determine the level of cold stabilisation will determine that. At one time the water bath method using electrical conductivity as a measure was popular, but it actually only determined the level of cold stabilisation at 0°C. The minus four degrees centigrade freezer test, determined the level of stability that the wine will have under those circumstances, and not necessarily for a longer time, and at a lower temperature.
With all these philosophical headaches to contend with, the only proper way of stabilisation was to keep the wine cold for a very long time, or to seed it with crystals at a very low temperature. The effect was that the wine was often exposed to oxygen at very low temperatures where it can dissolve very easily, but it would only react at higher temperatures. Apart from these negatives the energy usage, cost, lowered total acidity and loss of carbon dioxide gas was a worry. Often wine had to be sparged with nitrogen inline after stabilisation to push out oxygen, while removing CO2, possibly flavour, and the nitrogen itself dissolving at low temperatures, foaming when the wine is mixed at a higher temperature. The biggest drawback in future will be the energy used during this process. After this long list of negatives, one would think that there would have been alternatives by now. Well there are, sort of.
Being an avant garde winemaker in my youth, I dabbled with mannoproteins even before they hit the shelves. Here was a product that would keep all the valuable attributes of the wine, without any of the negatives of cold stabilisation. The only drawback was that it only worked so-so. The product was too dodgy to use on big Tesco orders, and the amount of comebacks was always just below the threshold for concern, but only just. At bottling time I would often find that the mannoproteins would form a slimy layer on the filter sheets, and sometimes even block a filter. This meant that some of the proteins where being filtered out. I tried to compensate for this by adding the mannoproteins during bulk filtration, thereby filtering and dosing it at the same time, but I never knew whether the difference was just in my head. All said, Australia shunned the product until other countries stopped experimenting with it.
Another alternative for stabilisation is electrodialysis. This procedure involves a membrane that, at room temperature, removes destabilizing ions, potassium, calcium, tartrate salts using quite a low current. The energy usage is very low, but the capital requirement is quite high. Many people are touting this technology as the next big thing, because it does not seem to lower the TA significantly, and also (apparently) seems to improve the sensory aspects of wine.
The latest technology that is making my tail wag is the use of CMC. CMC is carboxymethylcellulose, and it was recently legalised by the OIV. CMC is used in food as a viscosity modifier and emulsion stabilizer. CMC works the same way as mannoproteins inhibiting crystal growth, and is added to wine just before bottling. The only negative aspect of CMC is that it is not a natural product, and if not used, has a relatively short shelf-life. The OIV specified that CMC’s used for winemaking must be of wood origin, so that would help a bit for the conscience.
I hope CMC is what it is cooked up to be, because it could be a wonderful breakthrough.
Winemakers love to gripe that Pinot Noir is the hardest wine to make. I disagree. It is not that it is difficult to make; Pinot Noir is difficult to get right. First, if you are not starting with good grapes you might as well pack it in. Americans don’t like to be told this, but all vineyards are NOT created equal. And great Pinot vineyards are scarce on the ground, at least as much so in America as in Burgundy (where less than 10% of the Pinot Noir acreage is designated grand cru). Second, not all winemakers are temperamentally suited to make Pinot. During the winemaking process, Pinot Noir punishes ego. Winemakers who must put their personal stamp on every wine they make invariably make bad Pinot, because tinkering with the process or “fixing” what appear to some winemakers as “problems” just does not work with this grape.
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