Tag: winemaking

Grape Expectations

Many people in the wine industry are returning to more artisanal and hand crafted forms of winemaking. You don’t need pavilion sized wineries and limitless funds to make great wine – just good taste and some common sense. Amanda Barnes learns a few tricks of the trade to make superb wine the simple way.

For Wine-Republic, February 2013

As you tour around large winery upon large winery you can sometimes become deluded into thinking that winemaking has to be an industrial process. Rows upon rows of enormous tanks end up looking like a fleet of steel robots and the nomadic story of a grape’s journey can sometimes get lost in translation amongst all the machinery.

Making wine is actually a very natural and simple process, so simple that you can in fact do it in your bedroom. Wine fanatic and tour guide Victoria Mermoz started making her own wine in her bedroom two years ago. When a friend was going to throw away some premium samples of grapes from La Rioja, Victoria decided to take them home and see if she could make her own ‘vino’ without any training, fancy machinery or chemicals.

Hand squeezing each grape into a big water bottle, she left them to ferment in their natural yeast. She left the cap off the bottle a bit so that it could get some oxygen, but not too much either, and gently tipped the bottle up and down for a ‘pump over’ twice a day. If the temperature was too hot, she’d put the bottle in her fridge for a while. “I gave it three weeks for fermentation,” she says. “I tasted it everyday to check that it was not too sweet.” When she decided it was ready, she squeezed out the juice using a mesh fabric to separate the skins, put it into bottles to rest, waited a couple months and voila! Perfectly drinkable wine.

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February 12, 2013
Hey Presto! A Winemaker’s Box of Magic Tricks

I guess naively I always thought wine was very simple to make: pick some grapes, let them ferment and hey presto! You have wine. I figured it was probably discovered in some backwater farmland in Ancient Greece sometime when a forgetful farmer left his basket of picked grapes out in the sun too long and under the watchful eye of an imperturbable goat, the juice gradually turned into wine – a discovery to the delight of the Greek family that Sunday afternoon and to future wine drinkers around the world.

How wine was actually ‘discovered’ is a mystery, but what we do know is that people have been making it since at least 6000BC in Georgia. The oldest winery found so far dates back to 4000BC in Armenia and has relics of wine presses and fermentation vats. If they were that advanced 6,000 years ago, chances are the ‘discovery’,with my goat as the first eye witness, was long before then.

Something we perhaps neglect to realise though is that winemakers have also been adding things to their wine for a couple of thousand years too. We are often misled to think that 100 years ago, everything was ‘natural’ – there were no chemicals added to food or drinks and that using ‘additives’ is a nasty development since the chemical revolution and McDonalisation of society. In fact, winemakers have always used additives in wine – it was developed simultaneously as an integral part of winemaking. Even the Romans would throw in lots of sulphur to their wine.

One of the biggest clues that wine is not just fermented grape juice is when you see labels on bottles stating that they are vegan, or even vegetarian. What? Go back a minute. Vegan? Vegetarian? Why wouldn’t it be? Animal products in wine?! This is where you read a bit further and see: ‘contains milk’ or ‘contains eggs’ which can be pretty confusing for new wine drinkers who thought they were just drinking grape juice.

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May 8, 2012
24 Hours in the Life of a Winemaker

Although Mendoza celebrates with fiestas and siestas during harvest, winemakers are at their busiest time of the year. Amanda Barnes writes 24 hours in the life of winemaker Brennan Firth. **Article from Wine Republic(www.wine-republic.com)

April 25th: 12am

It’s midnight. The winery is much cooler, but I’m still sweating like a pig. I am running around like a bit of a wild man, monitoring tanks, tasting juice, taking temperatures and breaking down the caps. I have seven full tanks at the moment and the caps (grapes risen to the top) need breaking every five to seven hours. At this early point in fermentation the must is more like a thick soup – I lift the plunger high over my head and force it down into the stiff mound of blackish purple berries. It’s like kneading dough. I inhale the heady aromas: bananas, tropical fruit and the reminiscence of nail polish remover.

Jake (my intern) is washing down all the tools, pumps, equipment and the floor. I laugh as his head nods and eyes roll and he drops off into momentary sleep, only to be rudely awakened by spraying his own feet with the cold water.

1.45am
Tanks are ready, the place is clean and prepped for the morning and Jake is most definitely half asleep. We haul our exhausted sweaty bodies into the car. I don’t like to leave my grapes unattended for even a moment but I’m running on less than three hours sleep and have to pick the Malbec in the morning. I put on some loud music to keep us awake and we hit the road.

2am
Home. Cold beer, fag and a rather stale ham and cheese sandwich from yesterday. I stink, but I forget about showering and roll into bed.

4.30am
Alarm clock rings. Excited as a child on Christmas morning, I get up. My body doesn’t want to but my mind is reeling, desperate to get harvesting. Being part of the pick is really important to me. I’ve been tasting the grapes every day for the last month or two, and I know today is the day I want my Malbec harvested. You basically have to chew the hell out the grape to know when it’s ready – when the seed is no longer bitter and the grape not yet a raisin. Yesterday the grapes were prime, so today is the moment. This is it.I boil the kettle and bang on Jake’s door, I hear a grumble from inside, I bang again, I can hear his leg thud to the ground – mission accomplished.
We head out to the car. Checklist: Jake, thermos and mate [highly caffeinated tea] and very loud rock music to keep us awake.

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March 25, 2012