Wine Bugaboos

Keepin' it Clean

Y’all liked that last wine post.

Numbers don’t lie.

Good.

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In our last class, we covered some of the numerology: how many grapes per glass; how many tons per acre; the cost of a leaky valve.

This time of year, we are bottling. Unless some incompetent consulting manager decides to hold off and the white wines of last season go bad before they are bottled. (You know who you are…).

Hate it when that happens.

If a thousand gallons of white wine are lost through stupidity, the cost/loss calculation is as follows.

Thousand gallons is 3,785 liters. At 0.75 liter per bottle, that’s a little over 5,000 bottles. The business muck-mucks think in cases, not bottles or liters. That would be about 420 cases if you are interested.

Here’s where it hurts: the whites were quite good that vintage. In fifteen prior vintages I had never had occasion to discard even one liter of wine made with my own hand.

At 30.00/bottle, 5,000 bottles represents, retail, 150,000 dollars.

Very, very questionable business decision. I was angry because it was my wine.

Anyhow.

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OK, so bottling.

Generally speaking it takes two years from harvest to make red wine. That would be 18-24 months in barrel (more about barrel economics and technology later).

White are bottled and often sold 6-8 months after harvest depending on where the warehouse stands on sales of prior vintages. Well-made wine is capable of ageing and retaining its quality.

That means, if the right grapes are chosen (healthy; the right varietals), and the cellar is punctiliously careful to be clean, a wine will retain kits value over years or in the best cases, decades.

This is more often true of reds than whites and I will explain later.

Oxygen exposure is also a factor which we shall save for later.

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Wines have to be prepared (chemically) for bottling. The bottling line has to be reserved six months to two years before it is needed. Supplies like labels, corks, capsules, inert gases, and bottles, in the best case, should be on hand before the bottling day. All appropriate equipment (hoses, pumps fittings) must shine with cleanliness.

If not, well, the domino effect kicks in.

There is something odd about committing resources to bottling.

This should never be done by anyone but the winemaker. Not a consultant, not a friend of the prospective winery buyer, not an offsite winemaker consultant.

No one knows his own babies better than the winemaker who has sweated blood for two to three years to bring his best to market.

If I remember, I am happy to detail the botched bottlings due to “too many chefs in the kitchen”. Arrogance is another bug-a-boo that can kill wine, and a winery iof they have any authority whatsoever.

So: harvest; store the wine carefully and follow its health with great diligence; get your bottling duck in a row and get ‘er done with the best cellar and vineyard hands you can recruit, and select volunteers who have been vetted for attention to detail and the ability to understand and follow orders.

Finito, for now.

Later…