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+--- Thread: Wine and Variables (/thread-18941.html)
- Kaet - 09-14-1999
If a winery know what variables make a "good" wine, why don't they just manipulate those?
However, if they do know the "recipe", why then do they have "bad" years?
- Thomas - 09-14-1999
If I understand your question, you believe there is a recipe for making good wine, and there is.
Good wine is produced from good grapes, which rely on a good year and good growing practices in the vineyard. You cannot produce good wine from inferior grapes.
Of course, good can also be a subjective matter, but not to those of us who spend our lives earning a living from wine. And those who would make wine from a recipe are cooks not winemakers.
- Jerry D Mead - 09-15-1999
Kaet...It's not like brewing beer or distilling whiskey, where the same result can be repeated almost identically year after year.
Too many variables in wine. And same grapes, from same vineyard, picked on the same day and given to different winemakers will yield wildly different wines sometimes. Why?
In the case of a red wine...perhaps because of how long the skins are left in contact with the juice during fermentation will determine the amount of extraction and concentraion of fruit flavors...tannin and acidity and other components of the grape and its skin. And trying to do it the exact same amount of time the next year (or even the next day) won't work...because the chemistry of the grapes will be different. Even grapes picked from the same vineyard the next day will have different sugar levels, acid levels and pH, because of another day of sunshine, or maybe it rained, or....
Whether the fermentation takes place in wooden tanks or stainless steel makes a difference...oh! and what kind of wood? Is the wine filtered? (How heavily?) Fined? Barrel aged? How long?
And those are just a few factors. Making wine is not a factory kind of thing. Think of it as agricultural artistry.
JDM
- Athought - 09-15-1999
As to your question regarding "Bad Years", you have to consider that wine is made from grapes. A plant. One that is affected by growing conditions ranging from micro-climates, soil conditions, length of growing season, harvesting, and any number of variables.
Consider chardonnay for a moment. Here in California we have several regions that produce a fine wine, year after year. But, in each region we have different growing conditions. Coastal fogs are different in Santa Cruz versus the in and out that you'll find in Sonoma. Fog is ONE factor. There are many.
There's a recipe for success, but the variables are not as controllable as you would like them to be.
Just Athought