Bottling: A Lesson in Adversity

As I stood just outside the shade of the bottling truck, attempting to catch a little of Thursday’s beautiful 60-degree sun, I heard a grumbling mantra of “Murphy’s Law” coming from the direction of Joe, the bottling line technician. If it wasn’t one thing (the wet, humid weather on Tuesday) it was another (a mechanical problem with the labeler on Thursday).

Bottling was not off to an auspicious start.

There are lots of little things that can go wrong with a bottling, so I guess we should count ourselves lucky that both days the difficulties were more aesthetic than anything else. On Tuesday we couldn’t get the labels to stick to the bottles and on Thursday the sensor was malfunctioning and the labeler put too many labels (or none at all!) on the bottles.

But around midday Joe and Hunter figured out what was tripping the sensor and we were off and bottling!

My first job was to take a paper towel and wipe any drips off the bottles as the came down the line, after they were corked but before they got to the labeler. Well, being a bottling/assembly line novice, I was convinced that the bottles had to stay distanced precisely as they came out of the corker…

But then Joe came over and, much to my horrified surprise, picked one up—right off the line—and disturbed the symmetry. Then he wiped the bottle clean and let me in on a little secret: you see that sensor there (about, ohh a foot to my right and definitely within my peripheral vision)? It stops them, so they don’t have to be a specific distance apart. And indeed, the bottles were backing up in front of the sensor, waiting patiently to be capped.

Needless to say, I felt observant.

It wasn’t long until they moved me from drip-duty to catching the bottles as they came off the line, inspecting the labels and caps for imperfections and placing them in cases. Griff assured me that he usually does this job by himself, but I’m not at all sure how he manages to put the bottles in the case, send the full case down to Bert to finish packaging and put an empty case on the table in time to catch the next bottle coming down the line.

Granted, bottling our sweet wines is a bit of an unusual situation. We bottle the Vidal and Riesling in the tall bottles traditionally used in the Rhine valley in Germany (where Riesling originated). Because of their shape and height, these bottles are more prone to tipping. On Thursday, they’d come off the line normally, but instead of milling patiently, gathering to the side of the conveyor belt, one or another of the bottles would tip just slightly and we’d have sticky glass dominoes (I am happy to report that there were no casualties in the bottling of Basignani wine). Emily and I had our hands full, and I for one am glad I had help!  

I left the winery Thursday evening tired, sticky and smelling of fermented grape. And I’ll admit that my lily-white, never-done-an-honest-day’s-labor-in-my-life hands spent the weekend slathered in cream, much to my family’s amusement, but it was worth it! 

The Mystery of the Cork

Until Lynne asked me to help with the bottling, I never gave more than a cursory thought to what is surely most people’s first question about wine-making: how do they get the cork in the bottle?? (It is, after all, such a damn nuisance to get out…)

Consequently, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this over the weekend. And I’ve reached the conclusion that getting the cork in the bottle must be rather like the question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Ok, maybe not really, since you couldn’t possibly fire the glass around the cork and still get the wine inside (…or could you?). 

As I said, quite a bit of time.

The most entertaining of my imaginings involved a somehow shrunken cork that magically expands to fill the hole and seal the bottle when you touch it against the inside of the bottle neck with a pair of sterilized tongues (yes, Health and Safety regulations were even featured in my oh-so-thorough daydreams). In my imagination, corking was rather like...building a ship-in-a-bottle that displays full sail after you pull the string (assuming you’ve assembled the pieces correctly).

But while amusing, and with a distracting element of mystery (how does that cork know just when to expand?), this theory doesn’t make much—all right, not any—sense at all. First of all, the bottle in my theory was lying on its side. Given that it was supposedly full of wine at the time, well, it was quite the reality-defying cogitation as not a single drop of the ruby liquid was sacrificed. (It is also interesting that the wine in question was red, since we will be bottling the Riesling and Vidal…but that’s a puzzle for Mr. Freud).

After a while, I gave up these crazy theories and returned to my general state of twenty-first century disillusionment with the realization that there must be some nifty gadget invented specifically to cork wine bottles (there is: it’s called a <<gasp>> bottle corker). But since I wasn’t quite ready to return to the myriad papers that my professors misguidedly decided it would be a good idea to assign a second-semester senior, I began to wonder how the ancients corked wine before the advent of such useful technologies.

Of course, I forgot that we’re talking about a particularly innovative species with a decided taste for alcoholic beverages. The ancients had their ways…

Though the ancient Egyptians used corks as bottle stoppers thousands of years ago, it wasn’t until the 1600s that a French monk named Dom Pérignon first used cork to stop sparkling wine bottles. (He had noticed that the traditional wooden stoppers often popped out and that cork provided a much better seal).

Around 1770, corks began being used to stop cylindrical bottles, allowing for the first time the slow maturation of wine in a glass container. As bottles became mass-produced with uniform necks, the use of corks as stoppers spread. Today, Portugal is the world’s leading cork producer.

Well, that’s about all I know (and pretty much the extent of what the Internet can tell me), so I’ll have to wait until I finish my first experience with bottling on Wednesday to give you a full reckoning of the process. Until then…happy uncorking! 

April Showers Bring May Flowers...

…and what do May Flowers bring??

Up until a few weeks ago, I would have gleefully shouted PILGRIMS!! along with the large majority of elementary school-aged children plaguing their parents with this old-but-new-to-them riddle. What can I say? I enjoy a good (read: horrifically bad) pun as much as the next person.

But this year I have a new answer. May flowers bring…GRAPES!!

So much more exciting (and colorful…) than Pilgrims.

The other day I was sitting in the office, bemoaning the capricious weather that we’ve been having since, oh mid-February and wondering aloud when it would ever be spring. Then Griff said something interesting: Well, we certainly don’t want it to warm up too soon or too quickly.

Ohhhhhh riiight. The vines. Late frost. I tried to look knowledgeable, but my ignorance must have shone brightly because Griff took pity on me and tried to explain budbreak and the growth cycle of the vines and…well, I got lost pretty quickly.  

So, I decided to do a little research and figure out exactly where we are in the growth cycle (currently, somewhere between weeping and budbreak, which will happen to most of our grape varieties around mid-April).

Weeping, as Griff so eloquently explained to me, is the period of the vine’s yearly cycle in which the sap begins to warm and seep slowly through the vine, bringing it back to life. When the sap reaches the previously dormant buds, we have budbreak.

Shoots develop from these buds, and “even when the shoot is only a few inches long, developing flower clusters can be seen opposite the young leaves” (Hellman 15). “As the shoot grows, considerable development takes place….Of greatest interest is the [flower cluster initiation], since [the flower clusters] represent the fruiting potential of the vine for the following season” (Hellman 15). The flower cluster primordia will develop either into flower clusters (which will eventually bear fruit) or tendrils, “depending on environmental and growing conditions experienced by the specific bud and the shoot in general” (Hellman 15).

After the flower clusters are successfully pollinated, the berries begin to grow. “Flowers with unfertilized ovules soon shrivel and die, while those remaining begin growth into berries” (Hellman 16). This sounds a little dramatic, so it’s important to note that “commonly, only 20-30% of flowers on a cluster develop into mature berries. [Fortunately,] this is adequate to produce a full cluster of fruit” (Hellman 17).

There are three stages of berry growth: “rapid initial growth,” a “middle stage called the lag phase,” and another period of rapid growth” (Hellman 17). This last stage is called veraison, from the French for ripening, and “is discernable by the start of color development and softening of the berry” (Hellman 17).

In his report for Oregon Viticulture Hellman points out that “berries are considered to be fully ripe when they achieve the desired degree of development for their intended purpose” (Hellman 17). In my unschooled effort to determine when grapes are ready for harvest, I didn't find this vague generalization/statement of the obvious terribly helpful. But Hellerman does go on to later explain that the “ripeness factors typically considered when scheduling harvest are the sugar content, acid content, pH, color and flavor” (Hellman 17). A little clearer, but still dependent on some knowledge of how sweet or acidic or deeply colored the grape should be. Basically, the moral of this paragraph is: pick them when they taste right for making wine…if you’re not sure what that taste is (and I’m certainly not) experiment and/or ask an experienced vintner for his or her opinion.

Following the harvest, the vines go dormant for the winter months, a process in which they acclimate themselves to the cold and develop cold hardiness, then deacclimate in the spring, beginning the cycle over again.

For pictures of the various stages of growth, visit: http://www.grapes.msu.edu/pdf/Growthstages.pdf

Bibliography

http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/faculty/hellman_structure.pdf

Not So Much a Taste as a Feeling

“Why would you ever want to ruin a good cup of tea with cream or sugar?” It’s a question I’ve asked many a Southern friend who just can’t get over his or her Sweet Tea. Almost invariably meant as a rhetorical question, I never expect to get a rationally coherent answer that has to do with anything beyond personal preference.

But then I started drinking wine (and working here at Basignani), and I discovered tannins.

From tea to wine? Yes, my thought patterns are notoriously quite random (just ask my family and friends…keeping abreast of conversations with me must feel like watching a really bad tennis game with no out-of-bounds—serves lobbed without direction and returned unexpectedly hours later), but I promise that these two subjects are, for once, not at all unrelated.

You see, both wine and tea express tannins on the palate. What this means in terms of wine I’ll get to a bit later, but for now it is enough to note that talking about tea in a wine blog is not nearly as crazy as it sounds.

The word tannin, as you may have already surmised, is related to an old process for curing animal hides using plant compounds that cross-link proteins—tanning. Tannins are found in the bark, leaves and immature fruits of many plants and are often associated with a bitter taste. In nature, this bitterness helps the plants to survive long enough to reproduce (young grapes are bitter, for example, until the seeds are ready to be ingested by birds and dispersed…well, you get the picture.)

To get an idea of what tannins taste like, brew a really really REALLY strong cup of tea (Caution: Mug Contains Hot Liquid…please, let it cool before you taste it). ‘Betcha the contents of your mug are more than just slightly bitter—those are the tannins. 

Since tasting is so subjective, especially when it comes to wine, tea is a good way to develop a mouth-feel for tannins. As Jamie Goode explains in his article on the subject, “tannins contribute two characteristics to red wine…astringency (most significantly) and bitterness—these are sensations that are sometimes confused by tasters.” The “bitter perception is quite well understood, since it is one of the five primary tastes and is sensed by a specific receptor found in taste buds on the tongue and soft palate.” It’s astringency that gets the inexperienced taster.

According to Goode, “the common understanding [of astringency] is that it is actually mediated by the sense of touch rather than by taste. Tannins are thought to taste astringent because they bind with salivary proline-rich proteins and precipitate them out. This leads to increased friction between mouth surfaces, and a sense of dryness or roughness.”

Tea is much better for gaining a basic understanding of both these properties (bitterness and astringency) than wine, if simply because good wines are so complex that distinguishing specific aspects of the palate takes years and years of practice. But we all know that a strong cup of tea is bitter (hence why my Southern friends simply must dilute it with sugar). Tea is also an even better example of the astringency associated with tannins—even herbal teas (caffeine-free, and therefore not in the least dehydrating) leave your mouth feeling dry. That feeling? That wooliness between your tongue and hard palate? That’s the tannin. (If you’re not a tea drinker and cannot readily call this sensation to mind, try it out sometime! I promise that finally fully understanding tannins is worth it!)

Now that you’ve developed a sensory memory of what tannin tastes and feels like using the tea, it will be much easier to discern the tannin in the wine you drink beyond the basic: this is bitter or this is dry. You will be able to start observing differences in tannin level and how this affects the wine. Even the same vintage will change over time, becoming softer as it ages (hence why wines with low tannin levels should be drunk young while others should sit on the shelf for a bit).  

Tannins, though they may be found in all wine (more from barrel ageing in white wines, than anything else), are most noticeable in the flavor profiles of red wines. The tannin in red wine comes from the exposure of the juice to the grape skin (and I finally get down to the main difference between reds and whites…after the grapes for white wine are crushed, they are pressed immediately to separate the juice from the pulp and skins that would give it a deeper, red or purple color). When tasting red wine, tannin is identifiable (as earlier with the tea) in the bitter aftertaste or feeling of dryness in the mouth. A wine is tannic if the tannins overpower the other three components of balance (sweetness, acidity, and alcohol), and this overly tannic or bitter finish is considered a shortcoming.

A lot of new wine drinkers aren’t particularly fond of red wine, and I would hazard a guess that this has to do with the bitterness and dryness caused by tannins (personally, I’ve always preferred red…but then I also drink my tea black). Of course, everyone’s taste preferences are different—a wine you consider tannic someone else might consider just perfectly bitter. But now we know what makes us describe a wine as bitter or dry, we can start to develop a more discerning vocabulary.