Winberis

A Brush with Crush

    Recently I've been thinking quite a lot about applying the concept of "Fair Trade" to wine marketing in  the United States.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the American resistance to the delicious wines of South Africa is largely a vestige of Apartheid boycotting.  I also wonder if the well documented spats between Gallo and the UFW similarly leave a bad taste in consumers' mouths about the conditions of migrant or disenfranchised workers. 
    I came across a great article today in the San Francisco Chronicle wherein W. Blake Gray describes what it is like to work at the most basic level in a winery.  Granted, he is an author "working" at the invitation of a mid-sized family winery... Not exactly a recent arrival from Mexico worked to death by Guimarra Vineyards in the Central Valley... But interesting, and I hope enlightening just the same.

The Concise Index of Wine Faults

I have borrowed this from one of my favorite sites, please follow the link below... 

From Jancisrobinson.com 

Julia Harding MW, currently hard at work on the viti and vini entries to be published in the 3rd edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine due out in sep 06 kindly went to a symposium on wine faults so that you (and I) didn’t have to. Here’s what she learnt (surely required reading for all 85 candidates in the Master of Wine exams next month).

Bored with discussions about closures and tainted wine? Read no further. Want a summary of the main faults and their causes, plus some surprising statistics and aebstruse abbreviations? Read on…

Much of the information below derives from a seminar and particularly unpleasant tasting (nosing) of spiked wines led by Pascal Chatonnet in London last month in the grand but oddly subversive environment of the super-smart Sanderson hotel. Arranged under the auspices of Amorim, the leading cork supplier, the unhidden agenda was to point out how many wine faults could not be directly attributed to cork. Various samples of a (once) fruity southern French vin de pays had been spiked with chemical compounds, at different concentrations, to replicate the effects of a range of wine faults.

Before looking in detail at east of these faults, here’s a summary of some of the more interesting snippets to emerge.

- In a trial conducted by Southcorp in Australia involving 150,000 corks over nine years, the overall incidence of different types of cork taint was just 1.84 per cent. Of this, 1.5 per cent was due to TCA, according to the ANZWIJ article referred to below at *.

- TCA and other taints are more evident in sparkling wines and champagne because the taint compounds are volatilised by carbon dioxide.

- Oxidation may either increase or mask TCA.

- The compounds described below only become taints at or above perception threshold, depending on the compound and on the sensitivity of the taster. You may like a little Brett in your wine?

- The more often you smell a wine tainted with TCA, or any other fault, the less severe seems the taint because of the very significant effect of habituation.

- Perception of cork taint is exponential, not linear, so if wine A has 6 nanograms per litre (ng/l) of TCA and wine B has 12 ng/l, wine B will not smell twice as bad as wine A. The very severity of the taint starts to inhibit its perception: the brain reduces the intensity of perception as the concentration increases.

- Wine may be contaminated indirectly through products used in the winery other than cork. For example, bentonite stored in a winery where the environment is contaminated can then affect the wine during the fining process.

- Synthetic corks can be contaminated with TBA if they are transported or stored in a contaminated environment.

- Corks produced from cork bark close to the ground are more likely to give rise to TCA since there is a greater likelihood of fungi such as penicillin near the base of the tree. This is another reason why cork bark should not be stored in direct contact with the ground.

- Thus far, TCA and TBA are organoleptically indistinguishable.

Me:
There is an exhaustive index which continues listing more complete informationon TBA, TeCA, PCA, MDMP, IBMP and some fascinating information on incidence of Brettanomyces, but I believe it is only available to subscribers.  Come to think of it, why aren't you a subscriber?

A Really Cool Invention

    I recently began talking to an acquaintance at a Sonoma winery about augmenting their line with a wine from Chile.  I suppose it was natural that we chose Chile because 1) they have just the kind of wine we would want (California-style, well made, and inexpensive), and 2) I had just been there and me all sorts of people who would be helpful in this endeavor. 
    One of the first questions we addressed was, how do we get the wine here?  Do we import it in bottles or in bulk?  If we import in bottles, naturally we just use a temperature controlled 40' container.

   

 

    But what if it is bulk?  How would we be able to maintain the temperature of a tanker-style container during its weeks at sea?  The answer is Flexitank!  I love the idea, it is so simple... A food-grade Mylar balloon inside a temperature controlled 40' container, or a series of smaller ones on pallets.  You load the wine in at one end, blend and bottle at its destination;  I personally think frat parties would be better with 200 Gallons of White Zinfandel than a lousy keg in the pool...

   

   
Anyway, I think its awfully cool.

The ultimate in organic pest control

Normally when a vineyard enters the sixty day period between veraison (When the grapes change color) to harvest, the biggest non-fungal danger is birds helping themselves to the ever-sweetening bunches of grapes.  Typically wineries employ any of a number of measures to prevent serious loss to the vineyards.  Some of these methods include: firing shotguns, propane cannons, loudspeakers, etc.  None of these methods is likely to please your neighbors at 7:30 on a Sunday morning.  Another method, quieter but vastly more expensive is to hand-cover each row of vines with plastic netting (see below); yes, quiet, but a big pain in the butt.
I just read an article in the March '05 Wine Business Monthly titled "The Falcon and the Farmer" about another silent option which is pretty cool.  The article is about a guy named Getty Pollard of B-1RD who offers the service of running falcons in the vineyard to scare off starlings before they can even land (I suppose it is a similar philosophy to having a junk yard dog).  This alleviates the need for any other solution and becomes cost efficient (compared to netting) when you have only 150 acres under production.
I love the Idea of looking back in history to find solutions to historical problems... The battle between pest birds and falconers goes back (if my history serves) to North Africa in the reign of the Pharaohs.  Who says "new" technologies have to come from only one end of a time-line?

 

 

 

Click to enlarge

Microx and The Threat of New Technologies

On March 12th Jancis Robinson wrote an article on her website called "Tough Times for Coopers"(a subscription article unfortunately), in it she spoke of various dangers to the business of barrel making, one of which was microx.

There is no doubt that oak can provide unparalleled qualities such as stability of colour and succulent texture to a seriously fine wine destined for long-term ageing. Even raw young fruit can be made to taste smoother and gentler by a stint in oak. But there is now an alternative technique which has been widely adopted, particularly to make younger, cheaper reds more palatable. Micro-oxygenation involves bubbling tiny amounts of oxygen through the wine which, in a very crude way, mimics the sort of reactions with oxygen encouraged by barrel ageing. It rarely benefits very fine wine but it can certainly rush coarse, tough young reds on to the marketplace by softening all their rough edges.

Here is where I depart from my last couple of posts and show my new world roots; I think that new technologies can in fact serve a good purpose when used and discussed so that their benefits and shortcomings can be properly assessed.  Many New World and New World style producers already use microx and wood chips and many more will begin to do so as barrels get relatively more expensive with the shrinking dollar (new French barrels can already cost in excess of $900 each).  The next step will be for someone in a quality leader position to step out and say "I use these technologies and here's why".  They are not adopting new techniques without serious internal dialogue and hand wringing, why not inform customers and get the market feedback that will let them know how their new methods are being received?
Bob Kreisher of GrapeCraft Wines points out that there there are options beyond full or non-adoption. 

Microx and chips, especially during fermentation, are not a substitute for barrels, and are not designed to cover up flaws in poor grapes. Rather, they help winemakers to polymerize tannins and develop a complex structure that includes many characteristics that UC Davis has been teaching are flaws (like brettanomyces, [excessive] volatile acidity, and even Lactobacillus).

Perhaps we should start being honest about what is a threat to how wine is made, and what is merely another tool available to winemakers.  After all, what about using egg whites, fish guts or bulls blood for fining, what of using tartaric acid for acid balancing, sugar for chaptalization, cold for stabilization or diatomaceous earth for filtration?  At one point all of these must have been received as dire threats to the way things had always been done.  There must've been a guy who said, "I'm all out of amphorae, all I have left is this stupid old barrel..."

Let's talk funk...

I spent the month of January in Chile exploring export strategies and subjects to do with international branding.  While there I learned a number of interesting things, one of which was Carmenere funk (especially in a wine I will call Brand X).  When I taste a "funky wine", for instance some older styled Rhones, I often find myself leaping to the conclusion that the wine making facility was somehow infected with Brettanomyces.
I realize that this is probably unfair, so I asked a critic I trust (Jancis Robinson) what she thought.  In a piece called "Brett and Funkiness in Cote Rotie and Chilean Reds" she, Stephen Spurrier and Max Ezaguirre weighed in saying that the funk was "partly clonal, partly to do with vine age but largely, I suspect, concerned with geography and our old friend the t-word".
Somehow I wasn't satisfied.  No wine could hide behind the shield of terroir that had such a distinctive odor, and certainly that wine could not be considered varietally correct.
Well I met up with one of the owners of Brand X this past weekend and discovered a curious thing; that smell which had arisen from my glass was not (as lab testing determined) Brett, but rather H2S, hydrogen sulfide.
Apparently, when one sparges (sparging a wine means stripping it of oxygen or carbon dioxide by purging it with fine bubbles of an inert gas )  with nitrogen, allows some residual sugar and errant yeasts into the bottle, a bi product of the ensuing secondary fermentation is H2S... Who knew? (I'm not a chemist, so I didn't.)
Yes, Carmenere has a well known "horsey" component in the nose.  Yes also, Chilean wine making isn't always clean.  Yet no, I was wrong... in my haste to categorize an apparent flaw, I leaped to the wrong conclusion.  But cool! I learned something!