In a severe need for some Beaujolais I dragged myself to a restaurant wholesaler in the neighborhood.
Slim Beaujolais pickings there strangely enough. (They have a massive selection ranging from 4 euro bottles to grand cru Bordeaux) No Cru Beaujolais of note but I found discounted 2023 Domaine de Bussy. A Google search showed that the 2020 had a heart and 2 out of 3 stars from hachette so I bought a case.
It does hit the spot, uncomplicated, fresh and fruity. No nasty chemical tastes. No regrets for 8,50 euroâŠ
On the back label it states they use thermovinification. As I understand it this practice entails heating the must prior to fermentation to obtain a more fruit forward profile.
Am a bit confused though as I also understand some producers harvest at night to keep the must cool to preserve flavor.
How common is thermovinification? Is it unique to Beaujolais? Is it frowned upon by wine purists?
I appreciate the producer for disclosureâŠ
My understanding is that the warm-juice method works well for situations where fruit comes in with adequate sugars but something like underripe skins where the tannin would end up too hard and the hardness of the skins would lead to underripe flavours, perhaps in a cold year, for example. By essentially soaking the fruit immediately after harvest in a warm bath of juice for around 12 hours or so the skins are softened by the end of the soak. The fruit is then pressed off and fermented as normal. For larger-scale wineries there is equipment available just for this warm-juice method but I have seen smaller-scale wineries do it even just in a drain pan. It helps soften the tannin and shift the flavour a bit as well. It also helps to extract some of the colour from the skins to assist in binding anthocyanin to tannin later (part of how it softens the tannin) and make a darker wine. Underripe grapes otherwise often make lighter wine.
When I was a student at UCD (late 1990âs), we had a student in our class from a winemaking family in Germany. He did thermovinification as his student fermentation experiment in our class and it was crazy to see instant color before fermentation started. He shared they did it due to low color potential at their site in Germany. He liked it too since they didnât have to worry about punchdowns or pumpovers. He was very successful with extraction but me thinks his family wines did not command a very high priceâŠ
Summarizing: Warming the grapes leads to more fruit flavor and color extraction.
It does raise the question though; if you are harvesting grapes on a hot day and donât cool, arenât you are already using the warm bath method and essentially thermovinifyingâŠ?
As Larry indicated, temps for flash are high. About 70C+. Thermovinification historically and currently is not always that hot because it depends on the purpose.
Its most effective use case is for denaturing laccase, the highly destructive oxidative enzyme that can wreak havoc in wines if they are made from fruit with a lot of botrytis.
The other effective use case is making underripe red grapes (especially the Cabernets) more fruity and less green.
Those two cases require temps on the higher end. But the other use case is simply for style purposes. You can make a high color, low tannin red wine. For that you donât necessarily need such high temps.
Thermovinification has some specific downsides, too. The wines can be very hazy, difficult to filter, and require additional enzymes to help clean them up.
At least in California the only people I know who work with thermovinification are using flash detente. Itâs around but not particularly common.
I didnât see an answer to my earlier question about why the label for the Beaujolais mentioned in the OP mentioned thermovinification. Since I gather the technique is not uncommon in Bordeaux and Beaujolais, I assume that itâs not required to be mentioned on the label or it would be more familiar. I wonder why that producer advertised it, then?
Maybe to indicate style to the consumer? Itâs used to make light, fruity reds but they taste different from the light, fruity reds made by carbonic maceration.
Yeah I have a winemaker friend in Salinas Valley that loved to use the flash for bringing in fruit that wouldnât ripen well to get rid of the veggie qualities. Makes sense for low price point wines where you have heavy crops in cool coastal climates. Not my thing but seems like a good tool for large wineries who are faced with this more often.
