Thursday, January 6 2011

Winemaker Conference: Bottling It All Up

Their corker needs adjustment. Plus, the label goes on the outside!

Roaring back into the swing, I've gotten a bunch of physical labour done around the office. Between shoveling out my inbox and meeting people who've been waiting since Fall for me to get back in-country I had put off some tasks. First, I went back and stirred my sur lie wines and topped my barrels. Whew, they all still look great, much to my happiness.

Next, I got on with bottling the trials wines for my upcoming seminar at Winemaker Magazine's 2011 conference. Slated for May 20-21st in Santa Barbara in California, it's the only consumer winemaking conference in the world. It's the fourth one, and they're always a blast. Two years ago I did a full-conference seminar on component tasting, which went over pretty well.

Showing off my remaining thumb at the last Winemaker Conference

This time I've been asked to do a comparison tasting of oaked wines. Kit wines almost always direct that the oak products (added to give the character of barrel ageing without the expense and complications of owning barrels) be put in before the fermentation begins. For complex but interesting reasons which I won't go into here, because maybe it's only interesting to me, yeast modify the oak character greatly, making the wood/toast/vanilla much softer and easier on the palate.

Put a barrel in a chipper, you get oak chips. Not as tasty as potato chips.

However, not a lot of folks have done oak level experiments or directly tasted the difference between pre and post-fermentation oak additions. When you add the oak after the yeast is finished, the wood flavours are simply extracted by the alcohol, without softening or modification. My plan is to show those differences and the change it makes to they wine's finished profile.

I wound up making multiple batches of wine for the conference: unoaked for a control, 30 and 60 gram, light toast and dark, pre and post fermentation additions and a mystery batch. In order to get all that done and still maintain my day job and travel schedule I draughted one of my staff, Joanne, to do almost all of the work. I've never really gotten used to having staff--it's a good thing that Linda (manager of the retail store I'm responsible for) and Joanne (who covers retail part-time) are self-motivated because I'm pretty sure I'm the kind of boss who does the opposite of micro-manage. It's not 'macro-manage', I think it's more like benign neglect and occasional clumsy attempts at helpfulness. Thank goodness they're patient with me.

Joanne at the corker, glum as ever. Cheer up, could you?

After Joanne got everything fermented and clear we set up a day when we could get the bottling done. Things went well at first, with me handling the filtering. I'm really pretty good at it: I think I must have filtered ten thousand gallons of wine in the last 20 years. I'm a big fan of filtering, as it increases stability of the finished wine without harming flavour, aroma or body.  This kind of surprises people, as there's a meme out there that filtering 'strips' wine. Nobody sells filters powerful enough to take flavour, colour or aroma molecules out of wine¹ to civilians, and I have yet to taste an unfiltered wine that was in any way superior to a filtered version.

I can hear readers already: 'Then why do unfiltered wines market themselves as superior?' In my kindly moments I think that the people sell unfiltered wine do feel in their hearts that it's better. Other times I think it's a marketing gimmick. I used to feel like a lone iconoclast on this, until I read a quote by Christian Moueix in a wine magazine. When asked why he filtered his Chateau Petrus, at the time the most expensive wine in the world, he replied, 'Because I don't hate my customers.' Good enough for me.

We ran into a snag after filtering, though. The lab I was using was not my normal fermenting area, and it had an VAC issue while I was away. The wines, to cut to the chase, were saturated with carbon dioxide gas--they were fizzy. While sparkle, fizz and bubbles are nifty in champagne, they're very distracting in a table wine where I was trying to illustrate the oak character! Since I had limited time to complete the bottling, and had already booked Joanne in to do the work, I was in a bit of a pickle. I realised I was going to have to think outside of the carboy. Long story short, I wound up vacuum de-gassing the wine.

Vacuum degassing works by inducing a lowered pressure inside the vessel containing the wine. As the pressure drops, gas can't stay in solution and boils out, just as though the wine was being boiled on a stove--albeit with no heating.

Foamy, with a chance of fizz later in the day

With my vacuum pump attached, I tossed in a cleaned and sanitised bottle brush. Even in low-pressure environments, dissolved gas really needs a reason to come out of solution and unless it has a way to nucleate into a bubble, liquid fizzes only reluctantly. That's why very fancy champagne glasses have a tiny flaw or 'nick' in the very bottom of the glass: it provides a pointy bit where the gas bubbles can nucleate, come out of solution and then make the journey to the top of the glass, all pretty like. The bottle brush provided plenty of nucleation sites and sped up the degassing hugely.

After that it was all over but the shootin'.

Yes, it's a bit fancier than most folk's winemaking areas. I think I'm worth it.

Next step is to let the wine recover from bottling shock and do some tasting in a couple of weeks or so, to determine if I've hit the right marks. I'm also thinking that perhaps I should throw in an opportunity to taste an oak extract dosed wine with the mix. It sure would make a dramatic presentation, but it's another case of wine I have to ship down to Santa Barbara for the tasting trials, just what I need.

I really love making wine. It's kind of like baking, as opposed to cooking: you can fiddle a recipe and improvise (like cooking) but only if you understand the chemistry and physics behind the process (like baking). Of course, the added bonus is that you get booze instead of cupcakes, which is nice.

Next up, I've got an old barrel to tighten up and recondition, and a couple to rack and top and suchlike. This winemaking stuff can be pretty addictive.

 

 

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¹Think I'm wrong? Flavour and aroma compounds are molecules, strings of atoms that are exceedingly tiny. They can't be seen, even with the most powerful of visible-light microscopes. The 'holes' in the filter pad (passages, to be more accurate), meanwhile, are simply microscopic and you can see them easily with even a cheap microscope. There's no way a filter can block the passage of a molecule--if you want a comparison, if the molecules in question were the same size as a piece of thread, the passage in the filter pad would be the size of the moon. Any time you see coloured material on filter pads it's not stable pigment pulled from the wine. It's pigment that's already bonded to colloids or other material (like yeast) that's going to fall out over time anyway, and because it's attached to a visible particle, it actually makes wine look lighter, not darker in suspension, due to the Rayleigh scattering effect.

Posted by Tim in a bottle AT 11:43AM

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