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Wine Making

The most effective way to kill your enthusiasm for a subject is to familiarise yourself with every last detail of its inner workings.

Fortunately, there are only a few aspects of wine production that it is essential you know about - those that directly influence the wine's flavour, which is why you won't find much discussion here of processes such as fining, filtering and racking. Much of what happens to grapes - particularly those used to make cheap wines - involves compensating for poor-quality grapes. If all grapes were grown in ideal conditions, there would be little need to do much more than crush them and then ferment the juice that remains. For very expensive wines, that is more or less what happens: little is subtracted other than skins and little is added.

For mass-produced wines, the reality is rather different. In order to maximise the quantity of grapes produced by vines, quality falls by the wayside - with the result that people in white coats are required to do their best to compensate. In some parts of the world these efforts can take all sorts of forms, from the addition of everything from chemicals such as tartaric, citric and malic acid through to giant perforated bags of oak shavings that mimic the far more expensive business of ageing the wine in oak barrels. Gleaming, state-of-the-art temperature-controlled equipment helps too, as does the practice of blending grapes of different varieties or grown in different areas in order to iron out imperfections. The leaps and bounds in technology mean that winemakers are now capable of making silk purses out of sows' ears, so that cheap wine tastes better now than ever before.

TASTE TEST

Tasting wine won't help you learn much about the winemaking process but it will give you an insight into the effect that it has. Try tasting some grape juice, very oaky chardonnay and an unoaked Australian chardonnay.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Grape juice is wine that hasn't been fermented, aged in oak or generally messed around with, so it provides a useful comparison to gauge the impact that the winemaking process has had on the other wines. The two other wines give you an opportunity to compare wine that has and hasn't been oaked.

FATHOMLESS DEPTHS

Be aware that the depths of knowledge that can be plumbed are almost fathomless. Once you've got to grips with how wine is made, you can find out about the diverse sorts of oak used to make barrels, about vineyard management (including the mind-bending business of how the vines are trained), the amount of pruning that takes place, the question of yield. None of these subjects is static. Like any scientific subject, they are constantly evolving and if you really want to earn your colours as an armchair oenologist you have to be aware of every new development. In order to do that, you'll have to subscribe to every technical wine publication you can lay your hands on. The question to ask yourself is whether immersing yourself in all this knowledge will really help to deepen your understanding of wine - or whether indeed it might detract from the only two features of any wine that really matter: its flavour and aroma.


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