Wine making is a science without rules

By Heather Meade
hmeade@dailyadvocate.com

VERSAILLES — Between the Win­ery at Ver­sailles and the Win­ery at Wilcox (Pa.), nearly 1,400 tons of grapes are pur­chased or grown each year.
This year has been chal­leng­ing, said Mike Williams, owner and wine­maker. With drier weather, the chem­istry of the wine doesn’t turn out quite how it’s expected to, because of the uptake from some of the vari­eties and vine­yards didn’t have enough metal uptake, which eases the bit­ter­ness of wine, Williams remarked. Wines are harder to pre­dict, because they aren’t buffer­ing acid­ity as well.
They grow about 10 tons of grapes on-site at the Win­ery in Ver­sailles, and have also been for­tu­nate enough to find part­ners in Ohio, with nine new vine­yards, only three of which are pro­duc­ing so far, they are able to buy some of their grapes locally. The Win­ery also pur­chases grapes from Penn­syl­va­nia, Ken­tucky, New York, and Michi­gan, stated Williams.
“This year’s been a chal­lenge, to say the least,” Williams declared. “In good years, any­body can make wine, but it’s in the bad years you find out whether you’re going to earn your money or not. It can be very dif­fi­cult, espe­cially here in the east.”
It’s also dif­fi­cult to source con­sis­tent fruit, espe­cially right now, said Williams. He stated that wine mak­ers have to keep up with the tech­no­log­i­cal advances and tech­niques, despite using a tra­di­tional, hands-off tech­nique at the Win­ery at Ver­sailles.
“As time goes on, you have to know and under­stand the new tech­niques and why they’re in place, and the tools you can use when you have grapes that are sub­stan­dard,” Williams con­tin­ued.
The wine mak­ing process requires chem­i­cal test­ing, bal­anc­ing the pH, acids, yeast, nitro­gen, and sug­ars along the way to be sure to stay on track with the type of wine they’re aim­ing for, remarked Williams.
“You have to know where you’re start­ing from,” Williams said. “Wine mak­ing is a sci­ence with­out rules, because when you try to fol­low the rules and make wine accord­ing to a chem­istry stan­dard, you’ll fail. The dif­fer­ence between a $4 chardon­nay and a $400 chardon­nay is obvi­ously $396. How­ever, they can be priced appro­pri­ately. Chem­i­cally, there’s not a lot of dif­fer­ence, but aes­thet­i­cally, there’s a huge dif­fer­ence.”
The Win­ery also buys juice, sells juice, and makes bulk wine for other winer­ies, Williams shared. They begin by bring­ing the grapes in and crush and destem them in a machine specif­i­cally designed for that process. For white wines, the crushed grapes go imme­di­ately into a press, get pressed off, and the juice sits in cool tanks for 24 hours to four days, Williams stated. Then the set­tled juice is racked out and fer­mented. Then it is clar­i­fied, and mixed with other fruits and juices if that’s what the wine­maker decides to do.
For red wines, it’s a sim­i­lar process, but after crush­ing and de-stemming, the grapes are put into open top fer­menters for the fer­men­ta­tion process to begin. The grapes get punched down four times a day, and from that point a sec­ondary mal­o­lac­tic fer­men­ta­tion, chang­ing the malic acid to lac­tic acid to curb the sour­ness of the wine. Along the way the wine is fil­tered, clar­i­fied, and amended if it needs to be.
“The wine mak­ing process is done in stages. Some­times, all you do is hook up a hose from one tank to another, and that’s it,” stated Williams. “Then you sam­ple and adjust, and do it again, and then filter…You have to have a lab­o­ra­tory, because if you’re going to make a wine, you have to know where you’re start­ing from.”
His advice? Start with qual­ity fruit. He also sug­gests throw­ing away most of the recipes that can be found on the Inter­net. Also, don’t add water to grape wine, Williams asserted.
“You don’t want to adul­ter­ate it with water, not with grape wine,” he said. “Fruit wine is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent.”
The Winery’s best-selling wine, Rodeo Red, is made with table grapes, but an older style of table grapes, Williams said, not the mod­ern, seed­less grapes that can be found at the gro­cery. They also use black­berry juice, among other fruit juices, to cre­ate their fruit wines, he stated. And there are a lot of health ben­e­fits to using so many nat­ural prod­ucts, he said.
“There’s resver­a­trol, which is pre­dom­i­nantly in red wines, shown to reduce the inci­dents of heart attacks. Black­berry wine con­tains ellagic acid, the most pow­er­ful anti-carcinogen that occurs in nature. Our black­berry wine is between 12 and 18 per­cent black­berry juice,” Williams com­mented. “The antiox­i­dant effect of red wine and blue­berry wine has also been well-documented. I tell peo­ple it’s a beauty aide if my wife drinks enough, I can be really good look­ing,” Williams chuckled.

Posted by Ashley Fritz on Oct 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.