Wine, What Choices do You Make:

Let’s play a game together. Suppose for a second, you want to make a world class wine. Let’s chase this thought experiment to its end, and see what choices you face along the way.

Setting the stage

You have a vine. Hopefully, you’ve chosen a great location for that vine, in the 30-50 degree temperate zone in the northern and southern hemisphere, in soil that is a little marginal for agriculture, specifically a little basic (high pH). You want well-drained, easily penetrable soils with good water retention. Good job, we’re gonna assume you did all that in the past.

The vine struggled through it’s life, always having to work to achieve ripeness (a sadly necessary pre-condition for our lowly vine).

We harvest the grapes right at their optimal acidity and flavor concentration, at night, with teams of pickers that we employee year-round and pay well. (again, we’re pretending to produce the worlds best wine…reality may differ from what we are saying).

We haul the cold, unbroken grapes into the winery in small baskets, and the fun begins.

[Notice that all the above is just getting the grapes and bringing them into the winery…I didn’t even go into all that. That’ll have to be some time in the future]

Choosing what gets fermented.

You have to include the grapes (if not, what are we doing here) but you get to choose what else goes into the fermentation vat. There are some obvious no brainers: let’s take out what those in the industry call MOG (material other than grapes). Spiders, twigs, gloves, etc, all that random stuff gets discarded. Now the choices really start: Should you include or leave out the stems?

Stems

Left in, they improve flow and help promote liquid flow, and thus temperature dispersion (and help with the naturally occurring ‘cap’ of grape solids). However, they can also impart flavor, including very aggressive and hard green tannic flavors if not dealt with carefully. In the middle of the extremes, it can  be a nice and pleasant spicy character. Neither is good or bad, but it is a choice.

MOG

Also, you need to decide not just the stems, but what grapes do you throw in? All of them? (even the ones with a touch of mold? Gross) or just some? What if a few underripe berries are in there? Are you going to blend different grape (e.g. cab and merlot) together? Are you going to blend different plots of land together? You can still do it later, but this is when decisions start to happen.

Fermentation Tank

Ok, you made all those first rounds of decisions. Now, you have decided what you want, what kind of vessel do you want to use? Do you want a 10,000 hL tank? Do you want a little conical tank, a concrete egg, a barrel? They all have pros and cons, and WILDLY differing price tags.

Yeast

Once you get your chosen grapes in your chosen vessel, you have to decide what to do about the yeast? If you don’t decide, the liquid will often quickly decide for you, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Ambient yeast were the modus operandi for millennia, making all the wines of yore. Only in the last hundred years or so have we had the option to use cultured yeast. You see, ambient yeast pose a very possible threat: there is no guarantee that Saccharomyces cerevisiae is what will win in that wild battle, there are other yeast, lots of them! And other yeast do not ferment as well. Without the protective blanket of alcohol, more than just yeast can grow: spoilage organisms, etc. But ambient yeast give more variety and more interesting flavors usually…so which do you want.

Temperature

Good job! You choose. Now, you need to pick what temperature you want to ferment at. In a barrel, your choice is made for you. Volume grows at a cubed rate of length, and so the relatively small barrel keeps the volume of fermenting liquid low, and thus the temperature grows at a slower rate. The 10,000 hL fermentation vessel will shoot up into the stratosphere if it isn’t temperature controlled, but luckily, all fermentation vessels have temperature control included in some manner or another. This is a well-known problem. Below 50°F most yeast one convert sugar to alcohol, and above 105°F, they die. The higher the temperature, the more aromatic compounds blow away. Some of the initial compounds that blow away are gross though, so whatever. You get to choose. Most whites are low (around that 50°F degree) most reds are around that 80°F-ish temp. If you let it go past 95°F, it can get stuck. Getting ‘stuck’ is the word for a terrible shutdown that is almost impossible to come back from. But, color and tannin and flavor that red wines depend on happen better at higher temps. What’ch ya gonna do.

Length (Sugar)

How long do you let it ferment (you can translate this question into how sweet do you want it to be)? If you stop it, you leave sugar in the wine. The earlier you stop it, the more sugar. You can stop the yeast by making it really cold or adding alcohol and killing them. You can also cheat by letting the wine finish and adding sugar after. The first, making it cold (after filtration) is most of the classic European still sweet wines. Adding alcohol: before you start makes a ‘mistelles.’ During is how Port is made, after is how sherry is made. If you add sweetness after without alcohol, that’s usually champagne and sparkling sweet wines, and some mass market sweet white wines.

Élevage

Ok, so you decided, wines done. Good job. Now, do you bottle right away, age it a bit, a long time, or nearly forever?

The spritz of a freshly bottled Albariño or Grüner Veltliner is left over CO2 from fermentation. So that’s about as fresh as you get. Most rest for at LEAST a few weeks, just to let some of those very young and aggressive notes die down. Reds will sometimes age for a while, in stainless, oak or bottle. Note: the longer you age, the higher the investment the house makes, the more they’ll need to charge to make their money back. That’s not even accounting for the $1000 + barrel you might be aging in.

Bottle

Box wine? Cheap Bottle? The one that weights 10 pounds? Each has wildly different price tags, and wildly different associations with quality.

Market

Ok, so you bottle it, and now you’re ready to go to market with your cool new wine. You higher a marketing director, they send out all these samples, you get requests to come taste people on your great new wine, you get on the cover of Wine Spectator, and all is well.

What Was Left Out of Our Account

Note in this highly abbreviated series of choices, we didn’t really detail what could go wrong at any step, we only detailed choice moments. There was not the possibility of adverse weather, fires, viral infections, bacterial spoilage, marketing disasters, lead poisoning, reductive sulfur compounds, etc etc. And, if any one thing goes wrong, the wine, that vintage, is either lost fully, or lower quality.

The easiest way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start out in the wine business with a large fortune.

Note: What you can do with this info

I was transparent with what I left out. Winemakers make each of these decisions, whether or not they want you to know about them. If a winemaker isn’t talking about the points above, they either think you won’t care (which is often true). Or, they are not proud of the answer.

-Andrew Roy