Inquiring Winemaker
by Tim Patterson
September 2010
I spent my high school, college and grad school years avoiding science classes. I wasn’t anti-science, I just had other things on my mind -- the kinds of academic interests that make you nearly unemployable. Then I took a couple of computer programming classes at a community college, total cost about $25, and found myself quite gainfully employed doing a sort of science thing. When I got hooked on wine, I started wondering how it worked, and here I am.
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August 2010
For most of us, the mention of “barrel fermentation” immediately conjures up images of Chardonnay bubbling away in row upon row of French barriques, soaking up oak, impatiently waiting for the malolactic to kick in. But for an increasing number of high-end producers, some of those barrels are full of red grapes, a way of ensuring that fruit and wood intertwine from cradle to grave. And no, they’re not using long-handled tweezers to get the grapes in and out.
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July 2010
On a trip to Crete a few years back, a winegrower took me out into his vineyard to see the remains of an ancient “winery,” several hundred years old and marked with an official historical marker. The former facility was simply an exposed slab of rock, slightly slanted, with two natural depressions in it and a thin crevice connecting them: perfectly suited for crushing grapes by foot in the higher bowl, fermenting the wine, then draining it off to the lower cavity for “aging” and clarification.
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June 2010
Standardized commercial Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast strains first appeared on the market in the late 1960s. Less than 50 years later, new strains, crosses, hybrids and cocktail mixes are proliferating almost as quickly as the little fungi themselves. Yeast strain development is way beyond the lag phase.
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May 2010
I’m not claiming an exact count here, but I swear that for every article or technical study published about wine flavors, two get printed about bottle closures. Natural corks, new and improved natural corks, agglomerates, DIAMs, synthetics in a rainbow of colors, screwcaps with a multitude of liners, glass caps—they all have legions of fans and detractors, most of them quite vocal, and more research money flowing their way than you can shake a pH meter at.
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April 2010
Yeast is the undeniable heart of winemaking, the true winemaker that works the magic of fermentation while the rest of us watch and tinker around the edges. So it’s not surprising that a huge descriptive vocabulary has grown up around yeast, much like the proliferation of descriptors for wine itself. And like winespeak, some yeast talk is quite precise, and some fairly fuzzy.
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March 2010
Recovering good wine from gooey lees seems like such a good idea. The sludge at the bottom of all those tanks and barrels is mostly made up of the same wine (or juice) that got racked off, and it could be put to better use than compost, couldn’t it? After all, a lot of time and work and money went into that stuff, so surely…
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February 2010
When it comes to fermenter size, is smaller always more beautiful? Most of us are pretty well hard-wired to think that’s true.
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January 2010
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