From our August, 2010 edition

When it comes to winemaking, the winemaker is like a magician, pulling rabbits out of his or her proverbial hat, or a chef, finding just the right balance of flavour in a dish. There are numerous techniques available to the winemaker to alter the finished wine in some way. Some affect the aromatics and flavour, others the colour and aggression. All are fascinating. Here are but a few of the winemakers’ secrets.

Sur lie: In winemaking, after fermentation is complete, the dead yeast or “lees”, as they are called, fall to the bottom of the container and the wine is usually poured off of it. Some winemakers opt to leave the wine sitting on the lees and stir it regularly (called “battonage”) for a while, thus imparting more character. The resulting wine is then said to be bottled “sur lie”. It is most often used in the Loire Valley for Muscadet that is produced between the Sevre and Maine Rivers. Here the wine takes on a light carbonic spritz felt on the tip of the tongue. Sometimes it is used in Chardonnay adding complexity and giving the wine a slight creamy note, taking the place of slight oak aging.

Carbonic maceration (whole bunch fermentation): Those of you who like Beaujolais or Gamay probably enjoy it because it’s deeply coloured and fruity without any aggressive tannin that many other red wines have. Here’s why. It’s made through a process called carbonic maceration or whole bunch fermentation. Grapes are not crushed here but thrown into the fermentation tank whole. The cell walls within the grapes break down and colour diffuses out into the juice. It’s all about intra-cellular fermentation. Because there is no crushing, none of the bitter elements in the skins get into the juice and the resulting wine remains soft. This process has been around for hundreds of years and is utilized to make wines that are easier drinking. Sometimes, carbonically macerated wines and regular, yeast fermented wines are blended together for just a touch of softness.

Chaptalization: Sometimes in the process of winemaking, the winemaker will discover, before the wine is complete, that it will simply not possess enough alcohol as a result of a poor or cold growing season. Not enough heat renders grapes with low sugar levels translating to lower potential alcohol. So what can be done? The answer is “chaptalization”. Here additional sugar is added to the fermenting juice to increase the alcohol content. The yeast feeds on the added sugar creating more alcohol, not sweetness, in the finished wine. More common in cooler wine growing regions of the world, this process is sometimes not allowed and the winemaker has to make do with what Mother Nature dishes out.

Oak chips: There’s no question that oak treatment adds complexity to some wine as long as it’s not over done. Oak barrels are usually the norm but they’re quite expensive. An alternative and less costly approach that many wineries use are oak chips. Providing oak flavour, small fragments of oak in netted bags are immersed or floated in wine, similar to a tea bag in water. Certainly not as elegant or romantic as barrels, most producers would never admit to using these as it is considered inferior. However, it’s not too difficult to tell if they have been used. If the back label of a bottle describes a wine as having been oak treated, but mentions nothing about barrels, type or length of time in them, chances are, oak chips are the culprits.

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