Color me stupid, but is that not the case? Just need to shake it around a bit yes?
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You recall incorrectly, Leslie was correct.
https://www.ttb.gov/labeling-wine/wine-labeling-alcohol-content
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Well, you can’t shake around a huge tank of wine lol. But no, just dumping in and expecting it to blend well on its own is not enough. That would leave a very heterogeneous tank of wine. You need to stir it fairly well to get everything blended homogeneously.
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I’m also stupid like Rohit. I mean sure right away the tank might not be homogenous, but we aren’t talking mixing port and chardonnay. What property would keep them separate in different zones in a single tank given enough time? Density? I wouldn’t think that would vary much in “barrels destined for a single wine”, but I’m probably missing something.
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The former chemist/material scientist in me thought the same.
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Once everything is dumped in, and any short term mixing currents are settled, nothing happens. It just sits there. You could leave a tank for months, and it wouldn’t become more homogeneous.
See this thread for a practical experiment:
Significant variation in a bottling tank would surprise me. Especially for a wine like Pagani, that’s probably 5-10,000 gallons of fairly similar fruit. Easy to mix a single 10,000 gallon tank, and even if for some reason they didn’t mix the tank - which I doubt - the mixing from racking out of barrel and into tank through the racking valve would be fairly efficient for liquids of very similar viscosity. And if they’re pulling bottles for a tasting they’re probably coming from a couple cases of consecutively filled bottles anyway. It just doesn’t quite add up for me.
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Ben, I can only relate what I (and others there, even the pourer) experienced. Over several hours hanging out, tasting from a number of bottles over that period, there were distinct variations.
I do think your faith that dumping multiple barrels into a tank, especially a larger number of barrels, would result in even decent mixing of the contents, without actively stirring, is misplaced.
Pretty much every response in that thread points out the flaws in the argument, including that the hypothesized results do not match real life experience.
They are wrong.
But this current discussion is about blending/mixing barrels. My strong advice to anyone doing that is not to rely on that process happening without active stirring.
Oxidation is a chemical process, as is burning. The theory that oxygen must travel through wine by diffusion in order for oxidation to occur is like saying oxygen must diffuse through a piece of wood for fire to occur. It’s just wrong, no matter how many times it’s repeated or referenced,
This is a MONUMENTAL Vintage heard as much from one of my building’s managers (Pittsburgh).
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It could be great.
I always remember @larry_schaffer say about 2012 “we’ll see”
He was right.
We’ll see
Actually, that’s a pretty good analogy! What burns in a fire is the fuel on the surface, exposed to oxygen, not the interior of the fuel.
Exactly how do you propose oxygen travels through wine, if not by diffusion?
You’re welcome to argue with me on this, but you should know I have a Ph.D. in chemistry, and this is not a complicated question at all.
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Saw this note in Wine Advocate:
My mid-November 2023 visit to Napa (those reviews will appear in a couple of weeks) saw some winemakers still digging out tanks after a very late harvest. Spring and summer were cooler and wetter than usual, with many vineyards harvested three or four weeks later than average. Thankfully, much of September and all of October were reasonably dry and warm, so most vineyards were finally able to ripen. I did hear reports of some vineyards going unpicked and others of shortened macerations as wineries struggled to deal with the volumes all coming in at once at the end of harvest. Nevertheless, the general feeling regarding quality seems bullish, with alcohol levels coming in lower than average.
Somewhat off topic, but I wonder whether lower brix/alcohol actually was the key to “old school Napa” cabs, referring to something like pre-1975, I guess. I am not a historian, but while the alcohol level then was lower, there were many other factors that should be accounted for that comprised “old school” wine production. Where to begin? Many single varietal wines were blends of different parcels (single vineyard designation was very rare). Grapes were picked as efficiently as possible, ripe grapes and less ripe grapes together, and at the same time. The notion of monitoring small blocks for individual development and ripeness was rare, as was picking separate blocks of the same vineyard/varietal and fermenting them separately. As vines and vineyards have been replanted, different clones are now used based on exposure, soil and the like. The management of canopies and clusters, pruning for yields, soil treatments are all handled quite differently than fifty years ago. Not to mention the use of oak and new barrels, smaller barrels, different toasts. When I was kid in Napa and Sonoma in the late 1960s my strongest memory of wineries was of huge redwood barrels that towered over us. The amount of data collected in the vineyard and cellar is completely different now, as are the treatments based on that data. It isn’t that I think “old school” is better or worse than “new school.” It’s just that I don’t think 24 brix in 1970 tasted the same as 24 brix today. Nor do I think you can replicate “old school,” or if you could few people would buy it. It’s hard to buy a new 78 RPM vinyl record, and even if you could, you couldn’t duplicate the sound of field recordings made in the 1920s and 1930s, though Jack White is trying. There is something that can’t be reproduced about the culture and the spirit of “old school” wines and “old school” recordings, and that you can’t replicate.
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This is worth a thread on its own!
Whenever someone mentions big barrels, I think of this photo I saw in the book Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California:
“The largest oak tank in the word. It held 80,000 gallons and was stored in the San Francisco offices of S. Lachman & Co., one of the founding partners of the California Wine Association.”
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That’s what I’m talking about! Sometimes one of these giants that was too old (and given how old they were, that was saying something), were placed outside the winery with openings cut into either side so you could walk in and gaze up at the sky through them. Pretty cool for kids.
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Most of those oak tanks in San Francisco burned in the fires caused by the 1906 earthquake. There were so many barrels and tanks burned that the supply of Oak was insufficient to replace them so for the larger storage tanks they switched to redwood (which had been used before). The Redwood was a local resource also while the Oak had to come from Arkansas or Missouri and cost over twice as much.
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