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.
Winemakers in warm climates on the other hand routinely add (“adjust” is the word they prefer) acidity to musts from grapes that have ripened to sugar levels that are only dreamt of in Beaulolais but whose natural acidity has dropped to an unappetizingly low level on the way. Tartaric acid, grapes’ natural acid, is the acid of choice, but in some hot regions such as parts of California’s Central Valley and Australia’s Riverland, grapes can ripen so fast that there is just not enough body to support the necessary added acidity and the wines taste tart and hollow.
There is another, arguably more natural, way in which winemakers can accentuate the acidity of a wine. Alcoholic fermentation of any wine may be followed by a second sort of fermentation, the “malolactic”, in which the grapes’ harsher malic (appley) acid are converted into softer, lactic (milky) acids. Understanding and mastery of this second fermentation, by warming the wine and possibly adding special lactic bacteria, was the key factor in the mid-20th century in making red wine, and if the malolactic fermentation is deliberately suppressed (by filtering or fining the necessary yeasts and proteins out of the wine), the effect is to make the wine taste crisper. In practice malolactic fermentation is encouraged in most good quality Chardonnay to add texture and flavor, and in warmer climates it is compensated for by added acidity.
Malolactic fermentation is invariably good for red wine and in recent years a fashion has emerged for conducting it not in large tanks as was the rule, but in individual barrels. This needs much more labour and supervision so is warranted only for high-quality wines, but the result is a perceptibly smoother, more seductive texture when the wine is released – a character – istic that some wine tasters have come to associate with quality. Increasingly, therefore, winemakers are running red wine out of the fermentation vat just before the end of fermentation into barrels where the wine will finish its alcoholic and then its malolactic fermentation.
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-filledSkins 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. Winemakers in warm climates on the other hand routinely add (“adjust” is the word they prefer) acidity to musts from grapes that have ripened to sugar levels that are only dreamt of in Beaulolais but whose natural acidity has dropped to an unappetizingly low level on the way. Tartaric acid, grapes’ natural acid, is the acid of choice, but in some hot regions such as parts of California’s Central Valley and Australia’s Riverland, grapes can ripen so fast that there is just not enough body to support the necessary added acidity and the wines taste tart and hollow. There is another, arguably more natural, way in which winemakers can accentuate the acidity of a wine. Alcoholic fermentation of any wine may be followed by a second sort of fermentation, the “malolactic”, in which the grapes’ harsher malic (appley) acid are converted into softer, lactic (milky) acids. Understanding and mastery of this second fermentation, by warming the wine and possibly adding special lactic bacteria, was the key factor in the mid-20th century in making red wine, and if the malolactic fermentation is deliberately suppressed (by filtering or fining the necessary yeasts and proteins out of the wine), the effect is to make the wine taste crisper. In practice malolactic fermentation is encouraged in most good quality Chardonnay to add texture and flavor, and in warmer climates it is compensated for by added acidity. Malolactic fermentation is invariably good for red wine and in recent years a fashion has emerged for conducting it not in large tanks as was the rule, but in individual barrels. This needs much more labour and supervision so is warranted only for high-quality wines, but the result is a perceptibly smoother, more seductive texture when the wine is released – a character – istic that some wine tasters have come to associate with quality. Increasingly, therefore, winemakers are running red wine out of the fermentation vat just before the end of fermentation into barrels where the wine will finish its alcoholic and then its malolactic fermentation.
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