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Wine Blog

The steps from vine to wine

Posted by: Trudy and Rob

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 3:03 PM

We had a mighty fine bottle of cabernet the other night, a Behrens & Hitchcock '02
cabernet-cabernet franc blend called Dr. Crane Cuvee. It's been sitting downstairs for a

while now and tasted great after a long week. Behrens & Hitchcock doesn't make wine
anymore (a shame), but they have morphed into a winery named Erna Schein. I have
some of the new stuff but I haven't tried it yet. I hope it's as good. This, of course, leads
me to chatting a bit on what, or maybe how, a wine comes to be good.

As I mentioned in another ramble, it all starts with good fruit grown with care. At harvest
time, the grapes are brought to the winery for inspection and selection. The better
winemakers will select out the bad grapes along with the bugs and whatever other odd
things that may have become mixed in with the grapes. The grapes are then crushed or
pressed as quickly (and gently) as possible to avoid deterioration of the fruit. The juice
and skins are then placed in a fermentation tank, usually stainless steel these days,
although wood or concrete is still used in some cases (mostly overseas for the concrete
ones). These tanks (stainless) are temperature controlled to allow better control of the
fermentation process. Yeasts, either natural ones found on the grapes themselves or any
number of commercially available strains, get the fermentation process going. Different
temperatures are used for different grape types. Over a period of several days the yeasts
convert the sugar in the wine into alcohol and we are well on the way to producing a fine
product for our dining and drinking pleasure. Many wines undergo a type of secondary
fermentation called malolactic where bacteria turn harsh malic acid in the grapes into
softer lactic acid. Once fermentation is complete, the wines need to be clarified to get rid
of the skins, stems, and various other material in the fermented juice. The wine is drawn
out of the tank and may be subjected to any number of clarification methods ranging from
only racking (where the juice is drawn off of the residue several times over some months)
to what's called sterile filtration. In the latter, the wine is drawn through very fine filters
that remove almost everything including dead yeast cells. Some argue that sterile
filtration strips away much of the flavors along with the residue while others say that if
you don't filter, the remaining juice is a bacterial time bomb. There are very good, very
well known winemakers with different views on the issue. I've always found it
interesting that good wine is produced using either method although I personally tend to
like less manipulated wines more. The mantra of unfiltered and unfined does also seem
to help sell high end bottles.

After all of this, the almost finished product is usually placed in an aging container where
it softens somewhat. These containers are mostly wood (oak) or stainless steel with the
better wines seeing wood aging. Wood lets in some air to soften the wine and also
provides some additional flavors. Contrary to popular conception though, the majority of
wine doesn't spend much time aging at all before it goes into the bottle. It's the deeper
and better made reds, along with some whites, that see the most aging in oak.

Anyway, you can see that the winemakers really do have more to do then to happily pose
with their products in wine magazines extolling the virtues of fine wine. The
winemaking process described above is a very simplified description of what happens
during winemaking. The process of making wine involves many, many decisions on how
to proceed and if you screw it up, there goes that years production and profits. I guess the
important point is that the good wineries and winemakers exercise a lot of care and
control starting from grape selection through fermentation and bottling. We wouldn't
have it any other way, would we?