What does a winemaker do to his juice that determines when it is ready to drink? Just off the top of my head, we read a lot on this board that Dunn cabernets are built for aging, or at some point in time producer X started making their wines for early consumption. How is this done? Is it just determined by the type of grape, where it grows, when it is picked etc., or more about what is done in making the wine, and if the latter, what do makers do in production that determines when a wine is ready to drink?
All of the above, really. Unfortunately it may not be as cut and dry, but there are a lot of elements that play into a wine’s potential for aging.
Climate and grape type matter a great deal. Different varieties may age better than others due to innate qualities and their relationship to their climate, but the key is the development of phenolics and other compounds while maintaining acid (critical and difficult to do). Some may disagree slightly, but sufficient fruit character is also an important aspect as it provides balance later in a wine’s maturity when some of the “ripe” fruit characters fall away. There’s a good argument for limited levels of alcohol as well which can be influenced by winemaking, but is determined by climate and harvesting. For the most part, this is all done in the fields.
For production, the winemaker’s influence shows up in composition of the wine (What grapes are blended?), how long the “must” (juice, plus other solids) is in contact with the skins (when phenolics and tannins are extracted - this may be the biggest influence as tannins help stabilize/protect wines while they age), how much if any oak is used and other techniques in order to manipulate PH and so on.
So to answer your question more directly, in order to create a more approachable - young consumption wine, a winery may use riper fruit with higher sugars and alcohol (and often times, lower acid - which is sometimes manipulated during winemaking). They may also limit the amount of time the juice is in contact with solids (limiting the influence of tannins), limit the use of stems, use gentler techniques during primary fermentation (how often they punch down, or pump-over), may rack multiple times (to expose the wine to more oxygen which softens tannins) or use more or newer oak (which imparts more flavors in the near-term but can takeover wines in time). Speaking generally, the goal for many early-consumption wines is to bring out “fruit-forward” characteristics, limit acid, soften tannin and use more new oak.
I’m sure there’s others here that know more on the subject given the crowd here, but that’s a rough idea of a wine’s potential for aging and early approachability.
Thanks. Good info.
Pretty much spot on above…low acid, low tannin, high alcohol (which can be watered down) makes an immediate drinker…
Not sure it’s all accurate though. Low acid and low tannin may or may not be correlated with high alcohol and alcohol has nothing to do with whether a wine is an early or later drinker.
As far as oak, well, oak barrels are expensive. Putting wine into oak is an expensive proposition so you generally DON’T put young cheap wine into barrels that might cost you $900 or so. If you figure a barrique sized barrel holds about 60 gallons, and .75 liters is about .19 gallons, that times 60 that gives you somewhat just over say 300 bottles. You’d be adding $3 to the cost of each bottle. Makes no economic sense if you’re selling it for $10 or $15 for early consumption.
More typical for wines meant for early drinking is NO oak or just a few months in oak, or wood chips instead of barrels. Leaving wine in barrels for a few years actually helps provide some oxygen and that helps stabilize the wine, which is why some Tempranillo and Nebbiolo can live so long. Ditto racking. That’s a good thing for aging. It’s a reason you can have Riojas that are 60 years old and still young.
Gentle pumpover isn’t all about making a wine more consumable young, it’s about making a wine with less extraction of nastiness from the skins. Take a tea bag, steep it for a while, and then continually press it against the side of your cup with a spoon to extract all the bitterness you can. It’s a tea bag, so the tea is pretty bad to begin with and then your mishandling of it makes it even worse. Sip the tea and note how bitter and tannic it is. If you use good tea, you can ruin that too, so you’re not going to be rough with that any more than you would with the cheap stuff. In both cases, gentle handling will make the most of what you have.
Setting aside the grape variety, the determination is largely based on what the juice has going for it and then what the winemaker does with it. Grapes that are really ripe, with a lot of extract and flavor compounds will lend themselves to producing better wines that might age. You can have long or short macerations - that has less to do with the aging potential than with what kind of wine you plan to produce. You can do it warmer or cooler too, and that again has an effect.
When you do your maceration matters too. If you do it cold and before you start fermentation, you’re using the water in the grapes as the solvent and the stuff you get from the grapes is what can be extracted by water, especially sugars. So you get a fruitier wine. If you start fermentation and keep macerating, you’re getting extractions from the increasing alcohol and those compounds can be very different.
Barolo was made by long macerations and you ended up with really tannic and bitter wine that couldn’t be drunk for years. They were good after 35 years, but who drank them earlier? Now they do shorter macerations and the wines are still tannic and you can still age many of them for years, but some can also be drunk younger.
Basically, a winemaker uses cheaper grapes that have less material to work with to produce earlier drinking wine. And legend has it that on at least one occasion, some of the grapes that went into George de Latour from BV also went into Gallo Hearty Burgundy.
The former are made in California, the latter in France.
Greg, thank you for the informative post. This is probably the first explanation of “ageability” I have read that actually makes sense. Setting aside the question of what makes a wine that will “improve” with age (which your post does not seem to address apart from the discussion of harsh tannins and bitterness), Is it fair to summarize by stating that the two key factors relating to perishability are (1) the quality and ripeness of the fruit, and (2) whether or not the wine was gradually exposed to air to “stabilize” it?
How about the process of “fining”, where something like egg whites is added to the must, in order to precipitate out tannins, if I understand the process correctly. Afterwards, a “filtration” step would probably follow…?
Conversely, one sometimes sees “bottled without fining or filtration”…
Fining isn’t so much only about tannins.
It’s kiind of like dusting. The static charge on your cloth picks up the dust from your coffee table.
In the wine, there are yeast cells, pieces of grape, maybe tannins, proteins, etc., and the fining agent forms a kind of ionic bond - the particles stick to the agent and sink. Filtering is a clumsier technique for larger particles. But if you let the wine sit for a long time and rack a few times, there’s less need for filtering. In Rioja for example, lots of wineries only do a bit of fining to clarify the wine and they do no filtering.
Why clarify it? That’s a good question and better answered by a winemaker, but one thing you don’t want is to leave stuff that will rot or spoil in the wine so to the degree you can eliminate those, it’s a good thing. Some people think fining strips out flavor compounds with the other stuff. That’s the kind of thing I really can’t opine on and I tend to be a skeptic. I drank some fined wine today (Muga) and it was just fine and quite flavorful. Sometimes fining is to stabilize the wine for storage but sometimes just for looks - people don’t like cloudy stuff in their glass. But in the case of essenzia from Tokaj, that stuff is filtered and fined because it’s so textured and full of material that you wouldn’t be able to bottle it and predict any kind of life.
Oxygen is a completely different issue and somewhat controversial, but what was learned over time was that while barrels were nice for storage, the micro-oxygenation they allowed actually made the wines better bets for aging too. Rioja would probably be the poster example, but it’s true elsewhere too. Doesn’t mean new wood and doesn’t mean barriques - big old wood tanks work quite well. If you take LdH for example, their wines are racked and rested for a long time and they always have a slightly oxidized quality to them, but they last forever. So clearly the oxygen has played some role - small amounts at the appropriate time are actually good for the wine, at the inappropriate time, it’s bad.
In fact, if you were to look for the differences between wine made for long and short term consumption, Rioja is a very good area to look. The cheaper grapes, less perfect and less concentrated, will go into their young wines. They may even be done with carbonic maceration, which retains the color and fruit. They will have no oak or maybe just 3 -6 months. They’ll do a selection by vineyard and then at the sorting table.
For a crianza, slightly better grapes are used, but crianza is a stupid category IMO. Those wines are put in wood for a year. Now if they’re your worst grapes, why kill them in oak for a year??? Dumb. So in fact, the producers use slightly better grapes. But in that case, they may as well just make reservas and sell them for a bit more money, and some producers do exactly that. They make reservas and gran reservas only and sell off their cheaper grapes for jug wine. Tasting the grapes that go into the various bottlings while in the vineyard, the grapes for Gran Reservas will tend to have more concentration and flavor as you taste them from the vine. They may have more tannins too. So you want enough acidity to keep the wine vibrant, enough tannins to give it structure, and enough fruit and flavor compounds to last more than a year or so. Some of those old CA Cabs never really came around and I think that’s also the case with some Dunns, much as I hate to say so. They overweighted the tannins at the expense of everything else.
Tannins are also anti-oxidants tho, and they help mop up oxygen as the wine ages, so they’re good to have for reasons in addition to structure and flavor.
But even with good acidity and tannins, if you didn’t have enough depth of material to start, in 30 years you end up with an acidic liquid, or a tannic liquid, but something with little flavor. Those flavor and aroma molecules will fall apart and recombine over time and produce flavors that were never in the original fruit and that’s the point of aging wine - so it turns into something different and better. If a wine just stays the same, there’s no real reason to age it- just drink it up. But the aromas from an old Barolo or Rioja or Bordeaux or CA Cab are very different from what you had when the wine was young, and hopefully you still have enough vibrancy and structure to give the wine shape and life, and you have enough fruit and aromatics to give it interest. Then that’s a good wine.
But then on top of everything, you have fate. I’ve had a few bottles of wien that were like $5 or so and after 20 years they were magical. The winemakers didn’t ever expect anyone to keep them and they were as surprised as I was that their wine even lasted 20 years, much less tasted great. So to some degree, it’s still rather mysterious.
I think I’ve just learned more about wine from this short thread, than I’ve learned in years.
Don’t know if it has been mentioned, but how about more extended pre-fermentation cold soaks with punch downs? If the soaking is prelonged before the onset of fermentation, then there is little or no alcohol in the must (which would extract the astringent tannins)?
Thank you Greg for your very clear posting!
Thanks for the post Greg.
Greg, awesome post!