Improving on nature
It is at the fermentation stage, red or white, thet the winemaker decides whether or not to add acid or sugar. To many wine drinkers this may sound like cheating. Many winemakers, on the other habnd, maintain it is essential to achieving a well-balanced wine. French winemakers, apart from those in the far south, have been adding sugar to fermentation vats to increase the alcohol content (not sweetnes) of the final wine for 200 years ever since this process, now called chaptalization, was proposed by the agriculture minister Jean-Antoine Chaptal.
The AC laws incorporate detailed limits to the amount of sugar that may be added,generally the equivalent of no more than an additional 2% of alcohol, although even more can be added in cool climates such as England and Luxembourg. In practice, thanks to warmer summers and anti-rot strategies, growers have recently been able to pick grapes riper and riperless and less additional sugar is needed. It is rare to taste an obviously chaptalized wine, but some Beaujolais made in the 1990s seemed oddly alcoholic for its charge of flavour and extract.
In less ripe vintages in cooler climates, winemakers may also decide to exclude a portion of juice from the red wine fermentation vat so as to improve the all-important ratio of flavour-filled
Skins to juice (a practice called saignée in france). This traditional practice is increasingly being replaced by more mechanical manipulation. During the 1990s, for example, equipment for concentrating the must and removing a certain amount in Bordeaux’s top estates (these machines would be too expensive for basic wine). Used only to rescue inferior vintages they cannot add harmony to an unbalanced must and may eventually go the frequently mothballed way of winery centrifuges. Their counterpart for sweet white wine production is cryoextraction, a technique whereby water is frozen out of white grapes that have failed to reach an ideal sugar level, a sort of artificial Icewine production.