how it’s made - pt.2
I’m going back to Cali, Cali, Cali...
Next month my wife and I are going back to Napa. Fully vaccinated and with flight credits to burn, we’re going for an extended weekend and I couldn’t be more excited.
The itinerary is TBD at the moment, but I can promise you a few things:
I will visit Timm and Sharon over at The Terraces
I will attempt to eat my weights worth in bready goodness from the Bouchon Bakery (especially their quiche)
I will bring home some amazing wines to share with you
And as I shared in our last “how it’s made” blog, it’s super exciting because Napa was a pivotal point in my wine journey. Experiencing Napa took us from local wine buffs to full-blown wine fanatics.
In one part, because Napa is where the big dogs play.
To say, “world-class” wines are produced in Napa is not hyperbole (though it may be a trope at this point), and I’ve been blessed to have experienced some absolutely magnificent wines with amazing food and better people.
In another part, because Napa really elevated our tasting skills.
For us, flying across the country to drink wine isn’t something you do every day, so while you’re out there you want to maximize your time. That roughly translates into a schedule absolutely packed with different wineries.
Though, as some of you reading this probably know, wineries over there strongly encourage you to make reservations. You can’t just saddle up to the bar, slam a bunch of wine down, and roll out. At least, not at the places you’d want to visit.
You have to come correct. If you’re drunk (because, duh), you have to hold it together. You have to take the wine as seriously as the person serving it to you is because this isn’t just a job for them, this is their passion, this is high end, and this certainly isn’t amateur hour.
Fortunately, when you take wine tasting seriously, it does two key things. It strengthens (not sure if that’s the right word?) your palate, which helps you to be more perceptive to all the nuances you’ll experience in the glass, and it helps you better understand what the wine experts talk about when they run through the unique things about the wine that are evident in the end product (oak usage, malolactic fermentation, etc.)
Which, brings us to our next edition of the how it’s made story.
This past fall, I was lucky enough to be invited by Delaplane Cellars to participate in a very important part of the wine-making process, the barrel tasting & blending (for red wines specifically).
In this blog, we’ll talk a little about what that actually entails, why it’s important, and why it’s so damn hard!
(don’t be nassti perros)
let’s make some wine
There are so many articles and videos about winemaking, I won’t replicate all of that info here. Instead, what I’ll want to talk about is a very focused part of the wine-making process.
Though, if you are looking for a more in-depth breakdown, check out this blog from our friends at Wine Folly, How Red Wine is Made Step by Step. They have tons of great resources.
To recap from our last blog:
September 2020
Got to clip grapes from the vine (also tried to cut my finger off)
Helped sort grapes that were being prepped for fermentation (Lucy and the chocolates)
Watched Rick (the winemaker) operate a forklift like an F1 driver
February 2021
I tasted wine from the 2019 vintage
We evaluated quality & profile (as a team)
They decided on the final blend
As you know, a wine’s current “release,” where it’s bottled and sold to the public is usually from a vintage that was either the previous year or several years before. Particularly for red wine, after it goes through fermentation, the juice needs a lot of time to develop.
The fancy word for it is Élevage.
Élevage, A French word that describes an important aspect of winemaking but has no direct equivalent in English (other than the Anglicization ‘elevage’). Élevage means literally “rearing,” “breeding,” or “raising,” and is commonly applied to livestock, or humans as in bien élevé for “well brought up.” When its applied to wines, it means the series of cellar operations that take place between fermentation and bottling, suggesting that the winemaker’s role is rather like that of a loving parent who guides, disciplines, and civilizes the raw young wine that emerges from the fermentation vessel. The word élevage implies that all this effort is worth it, and is therefore normally applied only above a certain level of wine quality.
Source - The Oxford Companion to Wine
Shouts to the parents reading this, it probably “hits different” as the kids would say.
A huge part of the élevage is the winemaker’s influence on the aging vessel. For red wines, that’s almost always going to be in some form of a barrique, but again, as we focus on nuance, the type of barrel has a big impact as well. Things like, the size of the barrel, the type of oak (French, American, Hungarian), the density of the wood grains, the specific cooperage, a.k.a. where the wood is sourced, the mix of new vs. used, the toast level, etc. can all have a direct impact on what goes into the glass at the end of the day.
While some insist the wine is made in the vineyard (and that’s not too far off), to say that the winemaker doesn’t have a huge influence on the end product is short-sighted.
mise en place
So, let’s say you’re the winemaker now. Past you picked the grapes off of the vine at the perfect time, the juice has fermented beautifully, you’ve done the math on which wine goes into what barrel, and they’ve settled down for a good 12 months. Present you now has all the ingredients in place (mise en place) that you’ll need to make something spectacular, where future you can enjoy the fruits of your labor (literally).
That’s where the barrel tasting comes into play.
At Deleplane, there were roughly 40 barrels of red wine that we had to work our way through, and each barrel brought a unique characteristic to the table. For example, one barrel might have Cabernet Franc nestled in, and that barrel may have been used previously, so the “flavor” of the barrel may give off fewer oaky characteristics (vanilla, clove, nutmeg, baking spices, etc.), where another barrel might be filled with Tannat, but is comprised of Hungarian oak, which has a different flavor profile entirely, etc. so it’s important to evaluate each barrel individually before looking at what will ultimately make the best wine.
As a winemaker, you’re tasting constantly, but usually, you’re looking for flaws in the wine, checking to make sure all the different steps in the élevage are going the way you want them to, you’re not tasting the juice to see if it would be a good end product as is. So instead, often what wineries will do is they’ll bring in a trusted group of tasters to help evaluate the quality of the juice in each barrel.
Enter our protagonist, Dustin (not Justin) the aspiring wine bro.
He swirls his glass, takes a sip, and gives his standard
“hmmm, that’s interesting”
before jotting down some notes on a sheet of paper. The team looks at him for his feedback.
“This one is out for me,” he says neutrally, “let me tell you why…”
was that raspberry or cranberry?
Starting in late January / early February, Rick would pull down 15 wines to sample at a time (from 15 different barrels) and give those to his tasting team to review. He’d then break those 15 samples up into three different tasting groups, where we would evaluate each wine “blind,” side by side.
It wasn’t sequential necessarily, he wouldn’t go barrels 1-15, 16-30, 31-40+, but there were often themes or reasons why he would pair some wines together. One round might be all Merlot, for example.
The group would have to taste the wine and give incredibly descriptive detail of the aroma, flavor profile, structure, and give an overall opinion on “in or out,” which was more or less a statement on the wine’s quality, and if it lived up to the Delaplane Cellars brand. Sounds easy enough.
Fact check: nah
Have you ever tried to parse out aromas, yes, plural, and flavors in wine? Say wine #1 tasted “fruity.” You had to then go a step further and say what type of fruit it was. For example, was it red fruit? (cherry, cranberry, raspberry) Or black fruit (blackberry, black currant, raisins)? How would you describe the condition of the fruit? Was it fresh, ripe, juicy, or overripe, rotting, dried, etc.
That part was easier for me.
What was difficult was the aromas, parsing out and describing what you experienced at first glance, and after 10 minutes. Often when I’d smell the wine, there would be one note that would jump out at me, and I could tell there was something familiar for lack of a better word, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was hard, harder than it should be. (stay with me perros)
Turns out, there’s actually a scientific reason why:
Relative to our other senses, humans are bad at recognizing and naming odors. The overall ability of participants to identify familiar odors in odor recognition research studies is reported to be less than 50% (1,2). There are several reasons that contribute to this lack. The olfactory epithelium, the portion of the nasal cavity that initially perceives odors, as well as the portions of the brain involved in processing odors, are much smaller in humans than in other mammals (1). The diversity of odor receptors is also smaller; nearly half of the genes in our genome for odor receptor molecules are non-functional (1). The way the brain is wired for odor perception bypasses the other processing centers that would force integration with verbal processing, meaning you can perceive and remember an odor without ever identifying it with a word. In most human cultures, but not all, the language we have for odors is relatively impoverished with little redundancy. This means there is less reinforcement from multiple experiences, so words for odors are harder to encode in the brain.
Source - The Wine Research Exchange
The good news is like anything, practice makes perfect. And the best way to “practice” wine is…? Through drinking!
So if you learn nothing else from this blog, please drink lots of wine. Drink wines from all over the world, and enjoy what makes them unique and beautiful.
The important distinction here though, be mindful when you do. And tell us about them on IG @dustin_uncorked. I’d love to hear from you.
-Dustin