Topic 12: Wine: It was a very good year

What is wine?--Wine is made by fermenting  fruit juice with wine yeast, which energetically try to convert the high concentrations of fructose and glucose entirely into ethanol, which then kills them.  Wine yeast can be said to be sugarholics who meet the fate of some alcoholics.  We are talking about wine made from the fruit of the grape vine here.  Wine has more alcohol than beer, but less than distilled drinks. 

 What is the big deal with aging of wine?--Wine does not smell like grape juice with ethanol in it.   Why?  Aging.  In the process of fermentation and aging the "chemistry"  gradually becomes more complex as compounds  react with each other, and together they form an entirely new mix with a new aroma, that of wine.    It has been correctly stated the drinking wine is in fact drinking dead yeast killed by their excrement, which is the ethanol of course.  Alcohol is a poison, but it also seems to lower the risk of heart attacks when drunk in moderation.  Wine enjoys a reputation as diverse as any food.  Some people love it and others hate it.  Americans generally do not go for wine like the Europeans. Good wines are usually incredibly expensive and wine  gives some people severe headaches.  It is touted as a sign of a relaxed, cultured lifestyle, and lowers the risk of heart attacks.  While many fruits are made into wine it usually means the fruit of the grape.  Mead is fermented honey and water. 

 Wine is made from the fruit of Vitis species and dates from the dawn of civilization---Wine is made from several species of the woody perennial vine  Vitis, which occurs in both the old and New World and has about 50 species.  There is no evidence wine was ever made in the New World before the wine-loving Europeans arrived.  The best wine comes from Vitis vinifera, which is native to the Old World , specifically the Caucasus of Central Europe, and was domesticated before recorded history. Wine-making is one of the oldest cultural inventions of western civilization.  By the time of Tutankhamen  (1352 BC) wine jars were being labeled with the year of the vintage, the name of the vineyard, the name of the wine maker, and the region of production.   

Domestication of the grape involved selecting for a monoecious cultivar instead of the native dioecious species. 

 All western civilizations describe wine, including Greek, Roman, Hebrew as far back as their written records go. The Greeks stored wine in vessels smeared with pine pitch, to prevent leakage, which gave the wine a resinous flavor.  Now this flavor is added to make retsina wines.  The oldest evidence of wine making comes from Iran about 5500 years ago, but it was certainly going on before that.

  Romans, wine and Bacchus.  Eat, drink, and generate taxes Romans were urged on by Corporate Rome.  The Roman empire managed itself like Rutgers Incorporated, but instead of selling off soft drink concessions to the highest bidder and ripping off students and parents at football games, they ran a worldwide trade in wines in most of the regions still renown for wine making, including   Gaul (France), where they planted the vineyards which gave rise to the great French wine industry.  Roman   vintages were discussed in literature and records abound.  And unlike Rutgers , they had a winning team for a long time.  Maybe things will be different this Fall.  But is it really that important? The first historically great Roman wine was called Opimian (produced about 121 BC). 

 Wine, lead poisoning and the  fall of the Roman Empire .  You  thought  Rome fell because of lead  plumbing, right?  Wrong.  It was the lead in wine flasks.  The Roman aristocracy drank wines imported from Egypt and Phoenicia in large clay flasks called amphorae, which were sealed with a ceramic glaze that contained high quantities of lead.  The acids in the wine dissolved some of the lead that then ended up in the stomach of the drinker.  The remains of the ruling classes have a lead content in their bones  high enough to have been lethal.  The peasant bodies did not have the high lead content, and they drank from wine not stored in amphorae.   Everyone drank from the same lead-lined Roman aqueducts that provided water to the cities.  But cold water does not dissolve lead appreciably and goatskins do not contain lead.  

After the Roman Empire fell the art of wine making was nearly lost. The art of wine making was guarded by monks as part of ritual, and one of the good things in life. Monks planted vineyards and  refined  wine making with new techniques still in use today.   Chancre portrayed monks as hard drinkers who loved a good time.

 Wine is saved again--With Prohibition wine was banned in the US , and most wineries were forced to shut down, just like most breweries were closed.  A great loss of diversity ensued that has taken years to restore.  Only a few wineries were allowed to operate and were allowed to sell wine only to the church for religious purposes.  Nevertheless the skills were preserved which set the foundation for the later explosion of the California wine industry. 

 Welch’s grape juice--The process of pasteurization, which is heating wine or milk to kill microorganisms,  was not used on grape juice in this country until Prohibition.  The process was put on the market by the Welch Company.  Up until that time all Methodist churches celebrated the Lord's Supper with wine.  This was replaced by grape juice shortly after the marketing of the Welch product.  Oddly enough, one of the major bishops at the time was Bishop Welch.

 Vitis labrusca is the fox grape, and  makes foxy wine--The only significant N. American Vitis species is V. labrusca, which grows in Eastern N.A., and has been selected to form Concord , the most famous, but not the best  cultivar of the labrusca type.  Its skin has a mucilaginous inner layer, so it squirts out the contents when the grape is squeezed.  The labrusca grapes are more cold tolerant than the viniferas, but are not as sweet.  They are also more disease resistant.

 Climate and soil are important to wine--That is a major understatement,.  One of the  economic bases of the wine industry is the limited number of places that can grow good grapes for wine.  It takes just the right soil, often a rather poor soil, and just the right climate, and the best weather conditions, to make the best grape.  The sugar, acid and pigmentation of the grape are all strongly affected by the temperature, and amount of sunlight in the growing season.  If the soil is too good the grape leaves and shoots grow too much and do not put enough energy into the grapes themselves.  Fertilization is kept to a minimum.  It must be well-drained, and not very high in organic matter or in minerals.  At first this seems intuitively contradictory to what one would expect.  Unlike the tea grower, the goal of the vintner is not to produce leaves, but berries. Cloudy summers are death to good wine, and rain late in the season is terrible.  Most of the time in France something bad happens to prevent a great vintage.

 Phylloxera was a bad bug--Once upon a time there was a root parasite of the North American   labrusca grape, which did not harm it very much.  Some Europeans  (1855-60) took rooted cuttings of this plant to Europe to breed a better grape, and  introduced phylloxera to V. vinifera orchards.  The phylloxera liked vinifera very much, and did a lot of damage, practically knocking out the Euro-vineyards. Then someone got the bright idea  of replacing the vinifera rootstocks with labrusca  by grafting, which was done with great success.  It saved the day.

 Divide the % sugar in grape juice by  2 to get alcohol %--To make wine, the grapes have to have a high % sugar, which is fermented by  yeast into alcohol.  The more sugar the more alcohol, to a point.  Grapes typically accumulate about 20-24% sugar by the time they are ripe, which means they make wine with about 10-12% alcohol. 

 Fermentation and aging--Besides converting the sugar to alcohol, many other chemical changes take place in fermentation and aging that creates the highly complex aroma of wine.  The acidity of the grape will have a big effect on the final wine, as will the presence of a vast array of other compounds.  

 Sauterne wine is made from grapes purposely infected with a mold called Botrytis cinera that removes much of the water from the grapes, generating near raisins on the vines. At the same time, sugars are concentrated in the grapes giving the wine a greater sweetness and a higher alcohol content than other wines without the fungus.

 Botrytis cinera infects Rhine grapes also, which are allowed to overripen, even rot, or dry out and form raisins on the vine before they are picked, producing different flavors, depending on when they are picked, as follows:  spatlese (late gathered) is from late picked grapes that are not overmature yet; auslese (picked out, selected) from overmature bundles of grapes picked individually; beerenauslese, (selected berries) is from grapes showing rotting and drying; trockenberenauslese (dried, selected berries), is from rotted grapes that have dried almost into raisins. The same mold is responsible for rotting here as in the sauvignon grapes.

 Picking is followed by pressing--Pressing used to be done with the feet, now done with a press. Not too hard to break seeds, which are bitter and could add a bad flavor.  White wine is made by removing the skins immediately, rose wine has skins left during first part of fermentation, and red wine has skins left during all of fermentation. 

 Fermentation of the juice (must) is next--Fermentation happens naturally in  grapes.  Yeasts will grow naturally on the grapes and during pressing will  mix with the grape juice and begin to ferment it.  Prior to this century, there was no such thing as "grape juice".  Until a pasteurization process was developed, all grapes began to ferment into wine as soon as they were crushed and the natural yeasts exposed to the sugars in the juice.

How to ferment--Take the expressed grape juice, now called must or new wine, plus the pomace, which is all the skins, seeds, and whatever else is in there, and dump it into a fermentation vat; make sure there are no leaks.  Temperature matters a lot, and is different for  white or red wine.  Kill all the microorganisms with pasteurization or sulfur dioxide in the must in the vat and then add new wine yeast, Saccharomyces ellipsoides.  Sulfur dioxide removes oxygen and kills molds, yeasts and aerobic bacteria, but can cause headaches and increased acidity of gastric juices.  Fermentation means that the sugar is converted to alcohol by the yeast.  Fermentation goes rapidly for a couple days

 Pomace floats--The pomace floats up to the top after a while, and shuts off the oxygen to the must below, keeping bacteria away, which might turn the alcohol to vinegar. 

 Alcohol levels rise to about 15-18% over the course of several weeks,  which stops the activity of the yeast.  Fermentation slows when the sugar concentration in the must drops below 0.1%.  Most of the sugar is gone now.  To make a sweet wine, you stop the fermentation earlier, when there is still sugar around.  How to stop fermentation: add alcohol, sulfur dioxide, or pasteurize.  The wine smells like grapes now, with alcohol, nothing special.

 Racking--This means putting into clean barrels, which is done in the fall, then again in the spring, and again in the following fall for red wines.  What is the point of racking?  To get rid of the precipitated dead yeast cells, precipitated tannins and other junk that floats down to the bottom of the barrel. The wine is left in the barrel, the final racking, for 1-3 years, during which the flavors begin to combine, to marry.  In chemical terms the acids and alcohols chemically combine to form a new fragrant compound called an ester, which evaporates and makes the wine flavor, called the bouquet.   When to stop the racking?  It takes experience, and has a big effect on the quality of the wine.

 Fining--This is a way to clarify the wine which is done over a two or three month period inside the barrels, the function is to remove junk particles in suspension, which would make the wine cloudy,  by adding things like clay, gelatin or egg whites, which combine with the impurities and then precipitate.   Wine is also chilled to remove tannins, which taste bitter, and then filtered one last time before the next step.

 Bottling and aging--Wine is put into bottles, labeled and stored on the side to keep the cork wet.  The label is a big deal in wine.  It indicates where the wine was made, if it was made by blending several varieties, and the year it was made, which makes a big difference in quality.  Wines continue to age in the bottle, which means chemical reactions proceed slowly, with white wines aging much more rapidly and being through in 2-4 years, while reds can age for 30 years or more. 

 The cork was invented by a priest named Dom Perignon but he is much better known for another contribution, champagne.

  Champagne --It is a carbonated wine, supposedly invented one night by Dom Perignon, a Benedictine monk in a monastery who worked in the wine cellars.  As you will see champagne can not be invented over night, as in the song.  Dom knew that wine continued to age in a corked bottle. For what ever reason one day he removed the cork from a few bottles and added a little more sugar and yeast. He then replaced the cork and waited.  Tradition has it that the day he opened his new creation the Brothers were above him in the chapel singing hymns.  When he tasted the now carbonated wine he ran up into the chapel and declared "Brothers, come quickly...I am drinking stars".  He had invented champagne.

 How to make champagne the old-fashioned way: Make some wine and rack it over the winter, mix some varieties together and let it ferment in the summer in bottles, the second fermentation; let it rest a couple years in each bottle.  The bottle is turned on end and the sediment settles out in the neck; the neck is frozen, the cork removed and the sediment comes out; some sugar is added back to the wine, which still has yeast, and the cork is wired on, since pressure will develop; carbon dioxide is released in the third fermentation, which goes into solution under pressure.  Fermentation stops and some sugar is left, depending on how much was added.  The final dryness of the drink is classified: brut has less than 0.2% sugar, extra dry has less than 0.5% sugar, sec has up to 2%, and doux is 3-4 % sugar. 

 Aperitif and dessert wines--These have alcohol added to the wine, and other things are done to them to alter the color and flavor from a table wine. 

 Sherries--These come from Spain, have a long fermentation of 3 months, with a film of yeast developing on top at the end, giving it an unusual flavor; grape brandy, which is a distilled product made from wine, may be added before the fermentation is ended, making a sweet sherry used as a dessert wine, called  the oloroso sherry .  Why is it sweet?  Because the addition of brandy killed the yeast before the sugar was all used up.  A dry sherry is produced if fermentation is allowed to continue later before brandy is added.  Such a  a lighter, drier  type is called a fino sherry , such as amontillado and manzanillo, with higher alcohol of 19-21%.  Sweet sherry is oloroso, dry sherry is fino.