Thursday, February 7 2008
Which Kit is Right for You?
Decisions, decisions . . .
Continued:
So how do you decide which kit you need? First, it helps to understand the nature of the ingredients in the kits, and how that affects their outcome. We'll start with the basics, and it might surprise you to know that each of these ingredients isn't unique to kit wines: all of them are used to make commercial wines, and have been for a long time. While I'd like to claim to have invented this stuff, I'm just not that clever: it was much easier to borrow it from wineries that have already perfected it.
Concentrate: Grape Jam?
Concentrate is grape juice with the water removed. There are several ways to do this: you can boil the water off in a vacuum concentrator, squeeze it out in a reverse-osmosis unit, or sublimate it off with a conical distillation unit.
To go back to our earlier question, why use concentrate at all? Ahh, this will shock you: wine kit manufacturers use concentrate as a preservative.
This bears thinking about for a minute. If concentrate is grape juice with the water removed, what's actually left? Two things and a side-effect: a whole pile of sugar, a whole bunch of acid, and a very low, heavily buffered pH. These three things serve to preserve the grape juice, just like jam.
Jam is made by boiling fruit with rather a lot of sugar. The high levels of sugar increase the osmotic pressure of concentrate (and jam) which is very detrimental to microbial organisms. Osmotic pressure is a weird concept, but think of it like this: when you hang out in the bathtub all day, your fingers and toes get all pruney. This is because the osmotic pressure in your cells is higher than that of the bathwater: you're salty, the bath is not, so water dilutes your saltiness and your skin goes soft and floopy-looking. This is why people put salts in their bath water, to keep their skin nice looking.
In a high sugar solution, the liquid inside a yeast or bacterial cell has a lower osmotic pressure, and the sugary solution tries hard to rush inside. Very hard, in this case causing the cell to explode and die. Anything above about 34 Brix is enough to prevent the growth of most organisms, except for some very tough (but very slow-growing) exotic yeast and a few mould colonies.
Grape juice, just like jam, contains high levels of natural acids, which make for a low pH. Yeast and spoilage organisms don't thrive in low pH environments, so this prevents the kits from fermenting in their container. Also, low pH prevents browning and degradation, keeping the concentrate fresh and brightly coloured. The most interesting thing about this decrease in pH is that it is really persistent. Even after a wine kit containing concentrate has been rehydrated to the full volume of 6 gallons the pH will remain artificially low–that's what is meant by 'buffered'. It isn't until the yeast has cracked the sugars away from the acids and that the pH will rise to a more normal level for grape juice.
And that's why wine kits contain at least some concentrate, no matter what the starting volume, for the pH lowering and its concordant preservative effect.
Juice
Winemaking grape juice is made from clarified pressings from fresh grapes. It can be varietal juice, or a blend of different grapes. The two most important factors in juice quality are first, the absolute quality of the grapes used, and second, the level of retained solids in the juice. There are juices out there that are like goopy mud with solids, which makes for more flavour and more ageing. There are other low-solids juices intended for use in soft-drinks, baked goods and breakfast cereal (ever read the side panel of a 'no sugar added' breakfast cereal? Turns out they have a lot of grape juice in them–and grape juice is around twenty-five percent . . . sugar.)
Speaking of Sugar
There is a perception that because a kit may contain sugar it has been made from inferior concentrates, or with less concentrate and 'stretched' with added sugar. Consumers who are suspicious could even see sugar additions as a conspiracy–after all, sugar is less expensive than juice or concentrate. However, the addition of sugar to wine has a history going back hundreds of years, perhaps even longer: the Q'ran warns against drinking wine made with dates. Dates are a natural source of high-concentration sugar and they can be added to grape wines to increase the Brix level (sugar content) and thus the alcohol content after fermentation is complete.
Adding sugar to wines to increase the alcohol content is called Chaptalisation, after a minister in Napoleon's government, M. Chaptal, who was trying to improve France's agricultural system. Wines are Chaptalised because alcohol is a component in the flavour and structure of a wine. In the Burgundy wine region in France, for instance, cool temperatures sometimes produce grapes that are fully ripe, yet have insufficient levels of sugar to make a rounded wine. Here Chaptalisation is a necessary and well regarded part of the practice of making wine. Indeed, some of the greatest (and most expensive) bottles of wine in the world have been made from Chaptalised grapes.
So, the sugar is that it is there to increase the alcohol content. Using higher Brix grape juice could work to increase, if such grape juice were available, but usually it isn't. Adding more concentrate would also increase the Brix, but this would lead to colour, flavour and aroma changes–the wine would be unbalanced in intensity. This is particularly true of the acid balance, because some concentrates tend to have high levels of malic acid, which can give a slightly harsh edge to the finished wine. Also too much concentrate can lead to lurid, unnaturally purple red-wines, or dark yellow white wines ("You have wine in colours? Bring me some Beige wine!"). By using sugar to drive alcohol content one can achieve balance in the finished wine without worry about changing the flavour/colour profile. Bottom line: if any wine kit has low levels of flavour and aroma, it is due to a flaw in design or manufacture, not the use of sugar.
The Kits
100% Concentrate (No Winexpert product equivalent)
With their low levels of TDS, these kits mature very quickly, as they produce very few of the 'green' terpenes and esters described above. Within a week or two of recovering from bottle shock, they taste pretty much as good as they ever will, rewarding consumers who need wine in a hurry.
Vintner's Reserve
At 7.5 litres in volume, and with varietal juice content and higher levels of TDS, mid-volume kits mature at a slower rate than straight concentrate kits. Although they drink quite well after only a month in the bottle, they show their best after approximately 3-6 months for whites, and 6-12 months for reds. These times depend on a series of factors: which kit, what vintage, size of the bottles they are stored in, the corks used, and, most important of all, the storage conditions. There can be no guarantee of a date for maturity as it's up to individual conditions, and individual wines.
World Vineyard
Jumping up a step in both juice content and TDS, World Vineyard's ten litre (2.6 gallon) size us a little slower to mature than VR, but provide a greater reward after appropriate ageing. Although both reds and whites perform relatively well after three months, the whites perform best after six months, and reds require 12 months to show their best. Varietal differentiation is heightened in this formulation, and they reward further ageing–for at least two years.
Selection Original
At 15 litres (4 gallons) or so and with high levels of varietal juice and high TDS, Selection Original kits don't drink especially well for the first few months. In fact, many whites don't open up for 6 months, and most reds need 12 months to show the best of their aroma or flavour. This is not to say they taste bad: indeed, by three months of age they can surpass VR kits in taste and aroma. But they continue to develop fabulously. Indeed, while acknowledging the ageing differences mentioned above, most Selection Original kits will actually improve for three or more years (of course, only if they're cellared well!)
Selection Limited Edition and Selection Estate
Weighing in at 16 litres Limited Edition and Estate kits have the highest levels of TDS of non-grape pack kits, and the finest (and most expensive) juices available, usually from single, delimited vineyards. They require patient ageing to show their charms, and will develop over an even longer period than the premium kits. The whites are unlikely to show well before 12 months, and the reds can take 18-24 months before they really blow your hosiery off your appendages. But again, they do have wonderful power and strength when they're younger than that–many people drink them much younger with great pleasure.
One thing that distinguishes these kits is their price. High-end juices cost more, especially if they're from a prestigious area like Napa, Sonoma, Marlborough or the Stellenbosch, and there are some unexpected costs, like extra tank space. With luck, some of our kits can share juices between them: Australian Cabernet can go into a single-varietal kit as well as a Cab-Merlot, a Cab-Shiraz, a Mataro-Cab, etc. But if you're offering a single-vineyard, single varietal kit like Stag's Leap Merlot, you need one whole tank that does nothing but house SLM juice–and tanks take up space and cost money.
Selection Estate Series Crushendo
At 16 litres in liquid volume, with an added package of grape solids, these kits are made with ultra high-quality grape juices. Crushendo kits have by far the highest levels of dissolved solids. This should seemingly make the drinkability trade-off a real issue. The skins do add phenomenal levels of dissolved solids, which should give quite a bit of harshness in youth. But Winexpert is tricky like a fox.
We pioneered a technology that beats the grape skin material to within an inch of its life. When you open the skin pack it looks more like a bag of jam than a bunch of smooshed grapes. What's happened to them is a series of mechanical and enzymatic processes that first solubilises the skin of the grapes. The skin in a red grape is where the colour, flavour, aroma, and most importantly the tannin hang out. If you've ever peeled a red grape you'll note that the flesh is pale yellow. Wine gets colour from skins. The next step in the processing fractionates the tannins. And that's the key.
'Tannin' is a word covering tens of thousands of different polyphenolic compounds. Some tannins are harsh and aggressive on the palate. Some are soft and velvety. Normally in a wine made from grapes the tannins go in in a happy jumble, harsh and mellow, royalty and penny stinkard rubbing elbows like hoi-polloi. It takes years for the harsh and emotionally disturbed tannins to die back and mellow, and if you're really lucky, when the wine is finally ready the only tannins left are those velvety happy jobs. Fractionating the tannins allows us to remove the ones that are harsh, leave the ones that are mellow, and rather than tasting hard and mean when it's young, Crushendo kits taste pretty darn fine, right away.
This isn't to say you should drink Crushendo the day you bottle it. They still have rough edges that need to mellow and come into smooth maturity before they really replicate the finest commercial wines from grapes. Truly, with this extra level of solids and grape material Crushendo isn't for early drinking: it's for laying down and avoiding for at least a year or two. Yes, as with all wine kits you can drink them much younger, but they do get better and better as time passes. Hang onto them for two years to catch the beginning of what they offer, and two more years to savour their peak.
So when exactly is that peak? Tune in tomorrow!
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