The Art Of Winemaking

Wine is equal part science, craftsmanship, and art.

A master winemaker thinks critically about the wine. The chemistry, microbiology, and basic logistics. Good technique and attention paid to the wine are critical, of course. But much of wine is feel, art, and inspiration. Today, that is what I speak of.

Wine Is Storytelling. Choose Your Own Adventure.

Think variables. What are the switches you can toggle? What are the variables you can change the have an affect on the final wine. Once you’ve identified those things, you then think: what changes when I go up or down on this variable? Grape skin contact is a driver of many characteristics in a wine, for example. Many attributes of a final wine are the result of the nature and length of contact with the skins. Toggle this dial with great care. Oak, yeast choice, oxidative or reductive winemaking, etc: each is a dial to turn. Or a fork in the road, leading to the final wine.

There are many endpoints, and many turns to take along the path, but in all cases each choice is not categorically good or bad. Each humbly contributes to the tread of the pattern, weaving the way the wine turns out. 

For example, I choose largely high-acid winemaking. It protects the wine from spoilage, creates a refreshing crisp flavor in wine, plays in the 3-way flavor interaction between acidity, tannin, and perceptions of sweetness. It’s a safe bet, by and large, requiring only highly sterile filtration and/or use of velcorin. The wines taste extremely rough during their young age, but age with incredible grace. 

I love some degree of record-keeping, because checklists and standard procedures are the heart and soul of a high-quality repeatable process. But it is also important to acknowledge the repeatability is not the highest form of art. And wine is part science, part craft, part manufacturing, part agriculture, part culture, part history, part anthropology, part food, and part art. 

Wine Is Flow

So it is important to just play with the wine. Feel the shape of the thing, the space it holds, its natural balance. Some wines, some people, some situations are naturally sharp. Others are firm, holding their ground with force and certainty. The best are warm and open, receptive to the new and to novelty, what is casually known amongst winemakers as “slutty wine.” 

So I’ve made slutty wines, I’ve made dirty sex wines, cloyingly sweet cuddle and think melancholy thoughts wines, I’ve made breakup wine. I’ve made father figure wine. I’ve made “I’m fucking crazy and I hide it so well that everyone thinks I’m a well-adjusted individual at least until they get to know me” wine. Some people eat their emotions, I turn them into bottles of emotions. I am bottling up my emotions and sharing them in wine form, my personal method of alchemy. 

I guess a metaphor is to something I read while researching how to write. An author said he got to know his characters. I mean, they had created these characters, but then when they had a clear understanding of who that character was, then the author just had to think of that personality core while imagining the appropriate response of that character.

Each wine is a character, and once you understand what drives that wine, why it exists, then you can follow the wine along. Unless the wine/character is an asshole then you just knock them off in the next chapter. In wine this often means blending or dumping the wine. 

Take for example Cabernet Sauvignon: it has a unique set of characeristics, containing bell pepper aromas from green and blackcurrant from thiols. Enzymes to extract thiols. Yeast that convert those precursors. Esters as well to boost every other flavor in the style category by lifting the group perception. Spice and richness and complexity and foresty, earthy flavors from woods of various sorts. Meld it together with the flavors of aging and slow oxidative processes. Perhaps work in some low-level faults that just increase the “what the fuck is that I can’t stop thinking of that smell not because it’s good but because it is intriguing and frustrating because I can’t figure out exactly what that smell is, so mesmerizing” type of experience. Reductiveness, vinegar notes, raisined prune aromas, all of these can be elements of balanced complexity. 

So with all of this known, can you just then put it in barrel and wait? Yes, you can, and it will be a wine. But to get to know this wine truly, not just intellectually, you have to delve deeper. Personally, that often takes the form of the “drunk test.” I take a bottle of the wine home and spend an evening with it. Drink it on my deck as the sun sets. Throw on music that suits the wine. Read a book that suits the wine. Think deep thoughts and drink more. Make foods I think will pair with the wine. Perhaps share the wine with friends, if that is the kind of wine this is. 

This is how I came to my ideas of music pairings, literary and lifestyle pairings. Getting to know the wine, you gain an understanding of its character. Spending an evening with the wine, I come back the next day with a clearer understanding of what that wine needs to be complete. It is like seeing your friend who always wears a hat without their hat. You just give them their hat that they lost. It’s like that with the wines. The next day I go in and give the Cabernet a bit more oak, or blend in a pinch of Petite Sirah for more richness, or Syrah for more earthiness. I listen to the wine and react accordingly.