The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home
296
The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home
296eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
The Way to Make Wine reveals everything needed to make delicious wines—both reds and whites—from start to finish. Rich with insider know-how, this book divulges the many practical advances made in the past few decades and demonstrates that do-it-yourself winemaking is now simpler and more rewarding than ever. Straightforward illustrations of key tools and steps help make this book one-stop shopping for wine lovers, beer brewers, avid cooks, or anyone who’s ever dreamed of producing table wines at home.
This updated and expanded edition features:
* new how-to illustrations
* tips and techniques from accomplished professional winemakers
* up-to-date information on the rewards and challenges of running natural wine fermentations
* fresh ways to apply your home-brewing knowledge to make remarkable reds and whites
Providing concise, clear, and practical guidance, Sheridan Warrick shows that making your own wine is not only easy but also a pleasure.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520961296 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/08/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Way to Make Wine
How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home
By Sheridan Warrick, José Miguel Mayo Hernandez
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Sheridan WarrickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96129-6
CHAPTER 1
GRAPES AND OTHER INGREDIENTS
There's more than one way to get started in winemaking. Consider my friend who, on a picnic outing with pals in the Napa Valley, pulled up beside a tractor hauling a trailer full of grapes. He poked his head out the window. "Got any for us?" he yelled. The tractor driver waved an arm. "Still some out in that vineyard," he said. "If you want 'em, help yourself." The surprised picnickers laughed, but in minutes they were on their knees beside the dusty vines, hacking with pocketknives at the clusters of grapes. Hours later, with a few hundred pounds of fruit in the trunk, they sobered up. "We didn't have the slightest idea of what to do with it all," my friend says. He called the owner of a beer-brewing shop and begged for a rundown on turning them into wine.
That was 40 years ago. He now owns a vineyard in Washington State and runs a business selling grapes to home winemakers around the country. He has since made many remarkable wines but swears that the Zinfandel made from those first grapes — which he and his friends crushed themselves that night — could hold its own against any of them.
Making good wine your first time out, or your seventh, is not such a difficult trick. The key thing is to find good grapes. That doesn't mean you have to haunt the Napa Valley hoping you'll bump into a generous grower. It does mean that before you start rearranging your garage or investing in equipment, you have to know what grapes you'll begin with. Put aside for now the choice between Zinfandel and Cabernet, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. Here's a rundown on more basic options.
Fresh fruit. Grapes right off the vine are the gold standard of winemaking. The most desirable varieties are in the species Vitis vinifera, the European wine grape. Unlike other grapes and virtually all other fruit, vinifera grapes ripen to have an ideal mix of sugar, acid, and flavor compounds. What you get, after fermentation, is wonderfully balanced wine with enough alcohol to stay fresh-tasting and stable for months or even years. What's more, the many varieties of European wine grapes have for centuries been bred and selected to differ in remarkable ways — some ripen earlier, some later; some produce wines with exceptionally deep color, or extra acid, or strong fruity or floral aromas. Cabernet Sauvignon, for instance — a king among wine grapes — is known to be a centuries-old hybrid of two venerable Europeans: Cabernet Franc, a full-flavored red, and Sauvignon Blanc, a grape that makes brisk, fruity white wines. Whether the grapes spontaneously crossed in the vineyard or were deliberately mated is not known. But clearly someone tasted the fruit of the union and chose to propagate it. Cabernet Sauvignon is now one of the most widely planted wine grapes in the world.
Luckily, you don't have go to Europe to find great grapes. Wine grapes in the vinifera species — as well as hybrids between it and native American species — are now grown in most of the 50 United States. Check first with the staff at a brew shop in your area to see if they offer fresh grapes during the fall harvest season. (Start asking in June or July.) Ideally, the fruit should be trucked from a vineyard within a day's drive — any farther than that and the grapes could spoil in transit. Ask the price per pound, and expect to hear that the grapes cost quite a lot more than the ones at the supermarket. Find out which services the shop offers. If you're hoping to make red wine, will the shop crush the grapes for you or rent you a crusher? If you're making white wine, will they also press the crushed grapes so you can take home just the juice, ready to ferment? Or will you need to rent a crusher and a press? How much will it all cost? (For details on procuring fresh wine grapes, including hybrids of American grape species, see chapter 13, page 167.)
Frozen grapes. Many brew shops now sell high-quality crushed red grapes and white grape juices (in making white wines, the skins are always excluded). They come frozen solid in small tubs and large drums. More than a dozen different wine grape varieties are sold. Here's a partial list of the red and white grapes that have been offered by a supplier that delivers them, frozen, to home vintners all over North America: Barbera, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Carignane, Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, Grenache, Merlot, Mourvèdre, Muscat, Nebbiolo, Petite Sirah, Pinot Noir, Riesling, Sangiovese, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah, and Zinfandel. If you, like many wine lovers, prefer your Cabernet softened with a dose of Merlot, you may be able to order a blend. Once the containers thaw, you simply add yeast and carry on as if you'd done all the crushing and pressing yourself.
So far, frozen grapes and juice are available in only a few shops nationwide, but you can also order them online or by phone (see page 255). One winemaker I met — a Californian born and raised in Italy, where as a boy he watched his father turn newly harvested grapes into wine — had made his first batch from frozen crushed Barbera grapes. With no knowledge beyond his own faint memory of the way things were done back home, he made a remarkably clean and well-balanced wine. He seemed amazed that anyone found it drinkable.
THE YEASTS WITHIN
For all but a half-century of the 6,000 years in which people have been turning grapes into wine, vintners simply crushed ripe fruit and waited. Nature, or God, would do the rest — and almost always did. It took Louis Pasteur, the nineteenth-century French scientist, to figure out that the agents provocateurs were living yeasts, sugar-happy single-celled organisms present on grapes and in every batch of fermenting wine.
With no encouragement, native yeasts at large in the winery or transported from the vineyard often spontaneously set to work on a vat of crushed grapes, starting a full-on "natural" fermentation. It sounds ideal — why should anyone interfere? — and, in fact, some modern vintners make their wines exactly this way. But free-range yeasts can be unpredictable, sometimes generating off flavors and odors, sometimes giving out before all the sugar is gone. Most modern vintners — and you should count yourself among them — hedge their bets and add cultured yeasts with specific traits, such as the ability to thrive in the presence of alcohol.
It's amazing to consider what the tiny creatures pull off. Just a few tablespoons of yeast cells added to 500 pounds of crushed ripe grapes will double in hours, doubling again and again over the next several days in a classic out-of-control population boom. When the yeasts are raging, a single milliliter of wine — a quarter-teaspoon — may hold as many as 100 million cells. By the time the yeasts run out of food, they will have consumed virtually all the sugar, generating almost 40 pounds of carbon dioxide gas and more than 5 gallons of alcohol. Just a day after you launch your fermentation, you'll be up to your elbows in punch-drunk yeasts, and it won't be long before a faint aroma of toasted bread will follow you everywhere — your secret badge of honor.
Brew shops typically stock several varieties of wine yeast, usually in flat packets (5 grams each) similar to those holding baking yeast sold in supermarkets. Don't get hung up on the differences. For most red wines, you simply want a strong, heat- and alcohol-tolerant yeast such as Pasteur Red. For white wines, you want a kind that ferments more slowly and prospers at cool temperatures, such as Premier Cuvée. Don't believe that if you use, say, Champagne yeast to make Zinfandel, it will somehow end up tasting like Moët & Chandon. Other things — the grapes themselves and the length and temperature of the fermentation — have far more to do with your wine's flavor. You may someday want to experiment with specialized yeast strains (see chapter 11). But keep in mind that many wineries use basic yeasts and stick with them year after year.
THE OTHER BUGS
Yeasts aren't the only organisms happy to make a home in crushed grapes. Vintners have long known that by the time the ravenous yeasts finish up, special benign bacteria usually are in there, too, launching a secondary fermentation. Unlike yeasts, which love sugar, these "malolactic bugs" gobble a harsh kind of grape acid (malic) and turn it into a gentle one (lactic). Miraculously, it seems, the wine's flavor softens. (For more on this process, see chapters 4, 6, 9, and 15.)
In the past, winemakers simply hoped that bacteria around the winery would hop in and do the job — and often they would. But often isn't always. So enologists singled out and bred the finicky microbes, and now anyone can snip open a packet or screw open a jar and just add them, greatly upping the chance of turning out pleasing, food-friendly red or full-bodied white wines. (Light, fruity white wines usually don't undergo malolactic fermentation.) When you go shopping for wine yeasts and other items, ask also about cultured malolactic bacteria, available in liquid form or freeze-dried in slim foil packets that hold about 1.5 grams of "inoculant" — that is, many millions of dormant bacteria. The packets will be stored in a freezer at the shop. You should keep them refrigerated, too, until you're ready to use them.
THE WINEMAKER'S UNDERCOVER AGENT
Although grapes and yeast are winemaking's only absolute essentials, there is, in fact, another key ingredient. For centuries, vintners protected their wine from spoilage by burning pure sulfur inside empty barrels and casks. Without understanding the chemistry — but appreciating the outcome — they actually were adding minor amounts of a compound known as sulfur dioxide. Today it's added in precise doses not only to wines, but also to a wide range of foods, including dried peaches and apricots, fresh greens in salad bars, and specialty vinegars.
Although it sounds like something no one would want to eat or drink, sulfur dioxide is completely flavorless and odorless when used as it is in virtually all wines these days. The compound plays a role at nearly every stage of winemaking, inhibiting spoilage bacteria, suppressing rogue yeasts, preventing discoloration, and helping to eliminate off odors. What's more, it is amazingly safe. A small number of people have a condition that makes them exceptionally sensitive to the compound, which can irritate their respiratory passages. But many millions of people worldwide have for hundreds of years drunk wines treated with sulfur dioxide, with no short- or long-term effect of any kind. Most winemakers now add it as a white powder called potassium metabisulfite, or simply sulfite, available at brew shops.
Although you can make wine without sulfite, it's extremely difficult to make good wine without it. In professional tastings of commercial wines with and without the additive, those made with sulfite are consistently rated as cleaner tasting and better colored than those that lack it. It doesn't take much. To protect 5 gallons of red wine that you're racking (transferring away from any sediment) for the first time, all that's required is about a half teaspoon of powdered potassium metabisulfite.
That's an overly general guideline. For one thing, everyday measuring spoons are far from exact. The teaspoon in your kitchen drawer might hold as much as 20 percent more or less than your neighbor's — and there's no way to eyeball which is more accurate. Besides, the dose of sulfite your wine needs at each stage isn't always the same. White wines may need more than reds. Grapes picked in wet weather — that is, grapes on the verge of turning moldy — may need a bit extra at crushing. Likewise, grapes that start out low in acid may need more protection. (For full details on how and when to use sulfite and sulfur dioxide, see chapter 16.)
Because you want to add just enough sulfite, you'll want an exact means of measuring it. Most winemakers prefer to buy sulfite as a loose powder, in bags or jars, and then weigh it out on a gram scale, a light-duty weighing device calibrated not in ounces but in grams, the metric system's basic unit of weight. One type of winemaking scale — a triple-beam balance — allows measurements from zero to 600 grams (around 1.3 pounds), with each gram between zero and 10 marked off in tenths. (A tenth of a gram is about what a big pinch of salt weighs.) Brew shops now typically stock digital gram scales, some of which show tenths or even hundredths of a gram. But a scale that precise isn't absolutely necessary. Most of your measurements — and you'll make many — will range from 0.1 gram (a small dose of sulfite for a gallon of wine) up to about 100 grams (perhaps to make a sulfite solution; see page 221). In a bind, a reasonably accurate kitchen scale can save the day.
If spooning out loose powders seems bothersome, you do have options. Many brew shops carry premeasured doses of sulfite called Campden tablets. Most of them contain exactly 0.44 gram of sulfite — a scant quarter-teaspoon — although other sizes are available (usually 0.55 gram). As a general rule, two 0.44-gram tablets crushed and dissolved in water are enough to protect 5 gallons of healthy wine at racking. (For more on the exact sulfite doses needed to preserve your wine, see pages 214–226.) But don't think the tablets free you from fussing with powders. It's pointless to drop the tablets in whole — they need to be chopped into pieces so you can mete out precise amounts, and they should then be crushed and dissolved in a bit of water so the ingredient will disperse.
To enable you to skip the crushing and dissolving, some brew shops carry special effervescent sulfite tablets. They're made with a flavorless fizzing agent that helps to disperse the compound through the wine — a neat trick, except that the tablets are expensive compared to powdered sulfite, and they're sized for the convenience of commercial winemakers, who typically add them to 60-gallon barrels. You'll often need to do some arithmetic, and then carefully break the tablets into pieces, to get the sulfite doses you want. As the leftover fragments pile up, you'll find yourself longing for a gram scale.
No matter which kind of sulfite you use, bear in mind that all sulfite loses potency over time, so it's important to buy a fresh supply every year. Don't throw out the leftovers! Save them to make a solution for sanitizing your siphon and other tools (see page 35).
CHAPTER 2THE INS AND OUTS OF A HOME WINERY
We've all seen photos of dank cellars in France, the rows of barrels lighted by bare bulbs dangling from arches of moldy stone. It's a charming image — and in part a true one — but it sends a misleading message to anyone thinking about making wine at home. Wine doesn't have to be fermented in a chilly cellar. In fact, red wines made in small amounts usually need a bit of warmth. And even if you're making white wines, which are best when fermented slowly at cool temperatures, the ideal winery is not truly frigid. (Once bottled, wine should be stored in a cool place; for details, see page 104.)
Over the years, I've made wine on a back porch and in a bedroom, a laundry room, a garden shed, a basement workshop, and a portion of a crowded garage. The porch seemed fine at the time — we could lug up tubs of crushed grapes without traipsing through the house or worrying about staining the wall-to-wall. But it quickly proved troublesome. Chilly winds swirled around the wine at night, threatening to stop the fermentation. Raccoons and opossums, attracted by yeasty smells, scratched at the fermenter and even succeeded in knocking off the top. I can't say I slept well that year, but the wine, a Napa Valley Cabernet, came out fine despite it all.
Actually, the most comfortable and functional winery of all has been the garage, with its big door that opens onto a concrete slab — but that's in California. Winemakers in regions where the cool fall harvest season gives way to icy winter may need either to retreat indoors and set up shop in the basement or to insulate and heat the garage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Way to Make Wine by Sheridan Warrick, José Miguel Mayo Hernandez. Copyright © 2015 Sheridan Warrick. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and TablesIntroduction: Real Wine, Real Enjoyment
PART ONE: SUCCESS WITH REDS AND WHITES
1 Grapes and Other Ingredients
2 The Ins and Outs of a Home Winery
3 When Red Means Go
4 Then a Miracle Happens
5 A Pressing Engagement
6 The Quiet Stage
7 Watchful Waiting
8 Bottling and Beyond
9 Vive la Différence!
10 Clear and Clean
Part One Recap: Winemaking Step by Step
PART TWO: MAKING EVEN BETTER WINE
11 Bringing in the Yeasts
12 A Dozen Classic Styles
13 Getting a Grip on Your Grapes
14 Testing, Testing
15 Taking Control
16 Mastering Sulfur Dioxide
17 Making the Wine You Wish You’d Made
Suppliers and Laboratories
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Eminently readable. . . . Highly recommended to anyone eager to discover the thrills and delights of making wine at home."—Gastronomica: Journal of Food & Culture