Women of the Vine
Inside the World of Women Who Make, Taste, and Enjoy WineBy Deborah Brenner Gina Gallo
John Wiley & Sons
Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-06801-4
Chapter One
From Vine to Wine
The Job of a Winemaker
Tonight, as you sit at home or in a restaurant enjoying a bottle of pinot, stop and think for a moment about what it took to get this wonderful wine to your table. Winemaking is a long and difficult process that is often not fully understood. It is the winemaker who is ultimately responsible for your enjoyment of that glass after a hard day at work. The winemaker oversees the entire process, from growing the grapes to deciding when they should be harvested, figuring out the best way to blend them, and marketing the finished product.
The winemakers in Women of the Vine are not just businesswomen; they are also farmers. Successful winemakers make quick decisions to troubleshoot production problems and keep the process running smoothly on a day-to-day basis. Mother Nature can also interrupt the process, creating all sorts of sticky situations and wreaking havoc on the source of all wines: the grapes. The winemakers in this book explain that grapes are "a volatile product. You don't get a second chance and you have only one harvest a year. You can't just order more widgets. This is it." For these women, there isn't such a thing as a typical day at work. Each day, each month, each year, and each harvest are different.
Winemaking also varies according to the winemaker, the winery, the region, and the country. Each different technique and recipe helps the winemaker to create her unique wine style. The responsibilities of a winemaker can change if she oversees a large winery versus a small winery, but either way it is a tough, stressful job and a true labor of love for these amazing women.
A Day in the Life of a Winemaker and the Winemaking Process
Each step of the winemaking process is extremely important because each stage affects the quality of the wine. As if the job didn't have enough pressure!
The Vineyard
The winemaker must first communicate with the viticulturist. This is the person who manages the planting of the vines and the harvesting of the grapes. Vinification is the process of making the wine, and viticulture is the growing of the grapes. The viticulturist keeps a watchful eye on the progress of the grapes as they ripen on the vine and continuously performs lab tests to determine the best time to harvest. Science doesn't tell the whole story, and viticulturists will often rely heavily on their instincts and experiences to help them make this crucial decision.
The grape quality will affect the wine more than any other factor does. It is impossible to turn bad grapes into good wine, but, unfortunately, the opposite can be true. Grapes should be processed quickly after harvesting to avoid spoilage, and they are best handled when cool.
Once again, harvesting is such a pivotal time for decision making because the ripening process affects two of the primary compounds for making wine-sugar and organic acids. When a grape ripens, it accumulates more sugar, and this can happen rapidly. Simultaneously, the organic acids decline during the ripening process and can make the grapes shrivel and dehydrate, affecting the amount of juice and causing the clusters to lose weight. Winemakers may decide to allow the crop to hang on the vine and dehydrate a bit (this is called "hang time") so that more of the flavors can develop and also to help them determine the best time to harvest. Once the winemakers decide to harvest, however, grapes are picked as rapidly as possible and with the least amount of damage to the grapes.
Wineries use two methods of picking-manual or machine harvesting. Manual harvesting can be done quickly if you have a lot of hands on deck. Although it is a more selective and thorough process that minimally damages the grapes, it is not cheap. Machine harvesting can be much less expensive, but winemakers bear the cost in damaged vines and the number of good grapes that survive to be crushed. It can take about a hundred pounds of grapes to make between five and seven gallons of wine. The amount of juice extracted will depend on how juicy the grapes are and how efficient the pressing is. You can usually get approximately five 750-milliliter bottles of wine per gallon of juice. When you think about the scale of wine production in the United States, that requires a lot of grapes! Besides cost issues, a vineyard's topography and layout can largely determine the type of harvesting that a winery chooses. Hilly vineyards are difficult to machine harvest and are almost always harvested by hand.
The Crush
The winemaker now has to oversee the crushing and the pressing of the grapes. First, the destemming process separates the stems from the grapes. Then the grapes are pressed, which removes the juice and leaves only the solids, such as the seeds and the skins. To make white wine, the skins have to be removed immediately to separate them from the juice. It is the skins that affect the color, the flavors, and the tannins if they stay in contact with the juice for too long. Tannins occur naturally in plants, and in wine they come from the grape skins. They are responsible for the degree of a dry, puckery sensation in red wine, and they also help to naturally preserve the wine. When winemakers make red wine, they may choose to leave the juice with the skins and the pulp (sometimes for up to eighteen days) to give the juice more of the pigment, the tannins, and the flavors. The technical term for this process is maceration.
Many people think that sulfites are the cause of the ill effects they feel after drinking wine, but, actually, the practice of keeping the juice with the skins is to blame. The term sulfites is often used when people talk about wine, and sulfites may be listed on the back label of most wines you enjoy, but all wines contain a small amount of sulfites from the fermentation process. Some winemakers choose to add sulfur dioxide as a preservative, but with today's technology, it is used far less than ever before. Approximately 1 percent of the general population and 5 percent of asthmatics have an allergic reaction to sulfites, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Sulfites can be found in many prepared foods in the supermarket and in convenience stores because food manufacturers also use them as a preservative. So, contrary to popular belief, sulfites don't cause those nasty headaches you get after drinking too much wine, especially if the headaches occur after you drink red wine, because white wine contains even more sulfites than red does.
So how are the grape skins the culprit causing this ill aftereffect? Fermented foods and drinks contain two naturally occurring chemicals: histamines and tyramines. Histamines are in the skins of the grape and are responsible for dilating blood vessels in the brain. Tyramines do the opposite; they constrict your blood vessels. Either one of these chemicals can cause headaches. Red wines generally have a higher concentration of histamines and tyramines than white wines do because red wine spends more time in contact with the skins.
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