Monday, February 4 2008

Tempus Edax Rerum

Photo Courtesy Apex Wine Cellars

Our nearly-final installment on cellaring

"To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time."
–Leonard Bernstein

"Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark; a large group of professionals built the Titanic."
–Dave Barry

If you've been making your own wine for a while, you've almost certainly come across the Vandergrift principle of home winemaking: consumption rises to meet all available sources of wine. The two most common things I hear from people trying a kit for the first time (in order) are, "I'll never be able to drink thirty bottles of wine!" followed a month or two later by, "I have to make another kit–I'm all out of wine!"

The first complaint turns into the second one very rapidly because while few people drink thirty bottles of wine by themselves in a single month, you'd be amazed at how many friends you suddenly have when you have wonderful wine that you made yourself (and just how friendly they can be when you show up with a case of wine under your arm!)

The solution is to build up a cellar of properly aged wines that you can count on having around when you need them. This involves a bit of cellar planning (which we'll get into below) and some extra winemaking, but when you're done not only will you never run out of wine again, you'll always have the right wine, ready to drink, at your fingertips.

It's a little surprising to find out that although it's been extensively studied, the process that wine undergoes as it ages isn't perfectly understood. Don't worry though, just because the eggheads can't perfectly explain it, doesn't keep us from observing the typical course of ageing in our wine. We can use those observations to predict for ourselves when our wine will peak, and when we'll need to make more batches.

The best course of observation is to make enough volume of wine so that you can taste bottles from the same batch, every couple of months over the course of several years, recording your impressions every time–now aren't you glad you made thirty bottles? Armed with some observations you'll be able to plan both for the coming drinking season, and for the long-term.

If you don't have a couple of years to sort out some cellar notes, don't panic. By judicious choice of the types of wines you make, you can get started early and even fudge a little when you run short or happen upon a wine-related emergency. The world, my friend, is your bivalve mollusk, so make some Sauvignon Blanc and get the hot sauce.

Before we talk about cellar planning, we need to correct a funny impression that a lot of winemakers have: that when a wine is ready to bottle it's ready to drink. A quick trip through the local bottle-shop will correct this impression, because even the least expensive bottles are at least a year old, and anything with upscale notions is two, three or more years of age. This is because most commercial wines are intended to be drunk within hours of being sold. If you're like most winemakers you're so eager to try out your new batch that you're sneaking a 'taster' bottle right away. Sadly, one month old wine is not aged. It's barely settled down into the bottle, much less had time to shed its youthful roughness, esters, and general stinkiness.

Luckily most kit wines have an edge for ageing time. This is because as a general rule, the lower the level of dissolved solid material in a wine, the faster it will age. Most kits are made from juice that's been well clarified and after fermenting they get a fairly aggressive fining regimen. This ensures that there aren't a lot of solids to settle out and calm down before the aroma and bouquet of the wine can develop. Lower solids can, in some cases, limit the ultimate potential of the kit to achieve true greatness, so there is an element of trade-off there, but it's a pretty fine point, unless you were planning to hand wine down to your grandchildren.

Astute readers, however, will notice how I said 'most'. That's because there are kits and there are kits, and they vary in size, price, processing times and levels of dissolved solids. As a very general rule of thumb, the bigger and more expensive a wine kit is, the longer it takes to make, and the greater the amount of solids it has, the longer the ageing time will be and the greater the potential it will have to achieve high levels of flavour and aroma. The chart below might shed some light on this:

Concentrate refers to bad old day's wine: the canned stuff that was sold 20 years ago. The most it really had going for it was that it made wine that contained alcohol.

Vintner's Reserve/World Vineyard kits, with a moderate amount of total solids are usually ready to bottle in a month or so, taste a little less rough on bottling day, and improve pretty well for at least a year, leveling off sometime after that, but holding for a significant time before going into any kind of decline. They may trade a bit of long term development for early drinkability, but that's not necessarily a bad thing–especially if your starting with a bare cellar!

Selection Original kits, much larger, with more single-strength (unconcentrated) juice and more solids usually require six weeks or more before they can be bottled. While they are less ready to drink immediately, they improve steadily for more than a year, and can really reward long-term ageing. While the chart lumps International and Limited Edition kits in with Original, they don't show as well on bottling day, but they really pick up steam after a year, and most only really show their best after a couple of years–or more.

Estate and Crushendo kits, with the highest levels of solid material are like teenaged boys: sullen and uncommunicative until one day, after an interminable-seeming wait, they open up and surprise you. Of course, your Lodi Old Vines Zinfandel isn't going to eat you out of house and home or borrow the car and return it with the gas tank empty. Unless you use a terrifically aggressive fining and filtering regimen the majority of Estate wines (with the odd exception for Crushendo) are going to be a bit unlovable for that first couple of years.

Three things about this chart: first, it's not an accurate predictor of precisely how your kit wine will age. It's actually just here as a visual illustration of the trade-offs between ageing and early drinkability, so don't quote me about one year versus two. Cellaring conditions vary so much that there's no way to predict exactly how everyone's wine is going to age.

Second: Crushendo. Because the kit contains a massive level of dissolved solid material, which gives 'guts' to a wine, it would be expected that there would be an impressively long period before the green, rough flavours calmed down for drinking. However, the grape pack in a Crushendo kit is unlike any other grape pack used today--and it's significantly different from plain grapes.

The material inside the package looks a lot like jam because it's been processed to goo-like proportions. The grapes are crushed, and processed with a series of enzymes and heat to dissolved the cellulose holding the skin together. This allows for the release of colour and flavour compounds contained within the skins. They are then fractionated: the harsh-tasting short-chain tannins in the skins are removed, and the long-chain 'smooth/velvety' tannins remains behind. This way the finished wine has all the intensity of tannin and colour that a grape wine does, but lacks a lot of the nasty, hard green character of a young red. I'm proud to say Winexpert pioneered this technology and continues to improve it every year.

Third, you'll notice a confluence of all of the wines at about three months. This is because the Vintner's kits will have developed quite a bit of their final flavours in that time, and the bigger kits will have dropped quite a bit of their initial rough, green character. If you positively have to drink your wine early, try to wait at least three months before passing any kind of judgement on it.

Of course the answer to this is to make the wines you like to drink. But one of the great things about kitting out a cellar is having an array of different wines for different purposes, and if you're a foodie, having enough wines to cover a number of different menu choices.

Keep in mind, however, that if you're a vegetarian not only do you need less heavy, tannic red wines in your cellar for food matching, you also probably should go lie down now–you must be exhausted from the strain of reading this blog. All kidding aside (vegetables aren't food: vegetables are what food eats) if you're a big meat-eater, concentrate on the big reds, if you're a patio type don't skip the off-dry wines like Riesling, Gewürztraminer or 'Mist' wines, and the blush. If you're a fisherman make sure you've got plenty of crisp whites and a good Pinot Noir for salmon or grilled cetacean. Keep the everyday needs of your table in mind when you plan your cellar.

If you're not sure which wines to make, or you want to really cover all of your bases, you can really fill out a very decent cellar by making just five whites and five reds

Whites
Rosé/Blush (off-dry to medium)
Pinot Gris or Verdicchio or Soave
Sauvignon Blanc
Chardonnay
Riesling or Gewürztraminer

Reds
Beaujolais or Pinot Noir
Chianti or Valpolicella
Barolo or Zinfandel
Cabernet or Merlot
Zinfandel or Shiraz

The multiple choices are for your personal taste–Riesling and Gewürztraminer or Zinfandel and Shiraz are distinctly different varietals, but they carry about the same weight and intensity levels overall, so you can choose your favorites. These ten wines will carry you through almost any meal choice as well as everyday sipping but they're not the only choices you can make–your cellar should be a playground for your palate, not a prison for your expectations!

Posted by Tim AT 8:13PM

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