Wednesday, February 6 2008
Size Matters
The doctor said only two glasses a day
"Quantity has a quality all of its own."
–R K Ratch
"I hope if dogs take over the world, and they choose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas."
–Jack Handy
Someone once said 'good things come in small packages'. I'm pretty sure this was a shopkeeper who sold very small consumer products, or maybe a packaging company specialising in teeny little cardboard boxes. While it's true that size is not necessarily an accurate gauge of relative worth, sometimes it's an indicator that a bit more has been stuffed into something. And that thing might be a wine kit.
If you're a regular user/consumer of Winexpert kits you've seen the variety of sizes available on your local retailer's shelves. Metrically manufactured they go from 7.5 litres (Vintner's Reserve) to 10 (World Vineyard), 15 (Selection Original and Selection International), 16 (Selection Limited Edition and Selection Estate) and 18.5 (Selection Estate Series Crushendo which has sixteen litres of grape juice and concentrate and a 2.5 litre grape pack). But they all make the traditional 23 litre batch from that starting point with water additions ranging from 15.5 litres to a mere 7 litres.
The usual reason for escalating volume is to accommodate fresh juice into the kit. Concentrate is usually made to a sugar level (usually referred to, not entirely accurately, called 'Brix') of 72 percent. It takes less than five litres of 72 Brix concentrate to make 23 litres of roughly 12% alcohol finished wine. Single-strength grape juice runs from 20-25 Brix, so if you are blending fresh juice in, the entry level is approximately 7.5 litres in total starting volume of blended concentrate and juice. As you add more fresh juice, it occupies more volume, so the kits get bigger (and heavier, and pricier).
At some point you have to wonder what the deal really is: if concentrate is a good idea, why not use a small 100% concentrate kit and save your aching back. If juice is so much better, why use any concentrate at all?
I blame myself for not explaining this better. Winexpert is so focused on making products better, introducing new styles and encouraging people to try the hobby out that we rarely look outside our world to answer what are some pretty basic questions about where kits come from, why they're made the way they are, and how to choose the right kit that will deliver the best flavour and aroma–in the best time.
The last one is the key. The question I get asked more often than anything else is 'Which is the best kit?" It would be self-serving of me to automatically point to the most expensive one, and it also wouldn't necessarily be true (just lucrative, ha ha ha!). The best kit is the one that expresses the most aroma, flavour and character, when you want to drink it. The very 'best' kits with the most stuffing–flavour, aroma, tannin, bouquet, body, etc take a long, long time to come around and show off their wonderfulgoodnesses, in some cases as much as a couple of years.
This isn't the fault of the kits–not at all. It's an immutable aspect of all winemaking, consumer-produced or commercial. The vignerons of the Rhône give off a Gallic shrug and say 'the worse, the better', meaning the nastier, harder and less loveable one of their fine red wines is on bottling day, the better it will taste when it's fully matured and ready to drink. If you buy one of their best bottles from an immediate vintage and open it up in the driveway at home you'll be sorry, and you won't get your money's worth. If you'd held onto it for ten years it would have rewarded you with a blast of fruit, elegance, restrained power and lively intensity, instead of bitter tannins and aloof fruit hidden behind tartness and numb aroma.
On the flip side, if you buy a six dollar bottle of wine and crack it over burgers and dill-pickle chips that night, it's going to taste just fine as-is, no waiting. Woes betide you if you put a case of Chateau Plonko down for your newborn's 21st birthday (after all, you'll want to celebrate kicking the little rotter out of the house, yes?). It will probably be sufficient only for etching concrete and serving to in-laws. Something similar applies to wine made from kits–a value-priced kit will be ready to drink much sooner, having fewer demons to subdue, but won't reward your patience quite as generously as another higher positioned kit.
This dichotomous epiphenomenon (cheap=fast drinking, expensive="more" aging) has an amusingly tedious, er, TDS explanation . . .
TDS
What really separates differently volumed wine kits from one and another is the level of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) they have. TDS is what is left over after every bit of the water is removed from the kit. Simply put, the more total dissolved solids, the more aroma and flavour compounds a wine will have. Fresh, not-from-concentrate juices have more TDS and straight concentrate kits have the lower levels, while Super-Premium grape skin kits have the most.
But that's only half the explanation. When a kit has high levels of solids, it also has high levels of fermentation by-products and green flavours and aromas. 'Green' refers to the terpenes and esters in the wine kit that will, over time, change into the more mature flavours and aromas that make great wine. A kit with lower levels of dissolved solids will have fewer of these green characteristics, and be ready to consume sooner.
So how do you decide which kit you need? Better tune in to Tim's Blog tomorrow to find out.
| Posted by Tim AT 11:58PM | 0 Comments |  |
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