As a winery in The Other 46, how do you make the best quality wine consistently year after year?  By that I mean, let’s look at Bordeaux.  The wineries in the Bordeaux region know how to make Bordeaux wine because they have had hundreds of years to perfect the process.  The same goes for Mosel, and Rioja, and any number of old world wine regions. You ask the winemaker how he makes his wine and he tells you.  Go down the road, you’ll get about the same answer.  They know how to do it. They learned from someone who learned from someone who learned from someone….the knowledge and experience has been passed down through hundreds of years.  In comparison to all of that history, we are the new kids on the block, having to learn our lessons through trial and error, but gaining consistency in quality is attained through years of experience, so now what?

In the U.S., we have been growing grapes for wine less than 100 years due to Prohibition.  While Prohibition only lasted 13 years, it completely dislocated the wine industry as vineyards died, winemakers took different jobs, etc.  California, the state with the most experience and advancements in viticulture and enology, producing the vast majority of the U.S.’s wine (approximately 90%), still only has about 70 years of history.  Compare that to France, Italy, Spain and other areas of Europe who have hundreds and hundreds of years of history growing grapes and making wine.  Winemaking in the Republic of Georgia dates back 8000 years!  So, if California is still learning, imagine where that puts The Other 46 in the learning curve!

In most states, no one really knows what will grow best or how things will go year in and year out, especially when something unusual occurs, good or bad.  I remember a very well known winemaker from the Rioja region of Spain saying that she knows before harvest whether or not she is going to make a wine that is eventually going to be a crianza, reserva, or gran reserva. These all require different methods of blending and aging the wine to be labeled as such.  And there are other wines that are not labeled as any of these.  Just looking at and tasting the grapes she knew whether the wine from the grapes of that harvest would be aged 5 years, 18 months or just 6 months. The reason she could make this assessment is because decade after decade, previous generations of winemakers’ knowledge & expertise has been handed down.  They know what kinds of grapes to grow to complement each other when crafting their wine. The grapes harvested determined what kind of wine to be made that year, not visa verse.

Whereas in The Other 46, typically the first question you have to answer after harvest is “Now what?”  It’s also the first question you have to ask when planting a vineyard as far as what varietals, rootstock, trellis, etc.  There are decisions wineries in the U.S. cannot make until the harvest has been complete because they don’t know what processes or steps they will need to take to create the kind of wine they are going to make.  Because we are faced with something new every year, whether it’s uneven ripening, low or high sugar levels, disease, hail, drought, too much rain, etc., the yield from the varieties will throw the blend off.  Often early wineries, just throw some yeast in and see what happens, take copius notes, and take 10 or 20 years to figure it all out.  How do you learn so that next time this happens you know what to do?

The answer is micro-fermentation.

I highly recommend micro-fermentation every year to some degree. What is micro-fermentation?  It is the process of pulling small batches of wine, typically from the primary, first-fermentation batch, and applying one tweak or change – just one to each of those batches.  It could be anything from allowing one to ferment a shorter or longer period of time than the primary batch.  Or it could be adding oak or using delastage.  If you do it properly, you have a series of experiments that you can compare to the base line of the primary wine you are producing so that you can see how the specific one change made a difference in the wine. (Important:  Take extensive notes.  Make this a scientific project.)

If you are a new winery or have a new winemaker at your winery, then you have the situation of having no experience or knowledge in growing grapes and/or making wine from these grapes at your winery. And you certainly don’t have the knowledge to make the best wine consistently year after year.  

What is likely to happen as a winery owner or winemaker of a small winery where there is no history of grape growing and winemaking in that area?

You will fumble around and create some “alright” wines. You might even get lucky and craft a really good wine one year, but the next year when the weather and situation changes, you won’t know how to produce the same result.  A perfect example of what is likely to happen:  Napa, 1960’s: A group of vintners came together to share ideas on grape growing and winemaking.  Great, but it took them until 1976 to break into the arena of world class wines. Today in Napa, 30 years after “the tasting heard round the world,” almost all of the wineries are producing world-class wines. (Reminder, we are talking Napa – not all of California)  How have they all been able to become that successful and respected all over the world?  Historical data from their predecessors who took notes, collaborated, shared their knowledge and passed it down so that today’s winemakers continue to benefit from past errors, successes and experience.

You may be exactly where they were in the 1960’s. You may be the pioneering grape grower or winemaker in your area.  But you don’t have to wait all those years!   It doesn’t have to be that way!  Through micro-fermentation you can speed up the process through a controlled scientific method to accelerate the style and quality of your wine exponentially. Controlled experimentation is the difference between good and great! 

Stay Tuned for Part 2 of Micro-Fermentation.  We’ll break it down and show you some simple ways you can start your own micro-fermentation processes.