Gearing Up For The Winemaking Crush
The great thing about August is that you’re counting down the weeks until grapes are ripe and you can start on a new year’s installment of home winemaking. The downside to this time of year is that all the great wine you’ll be making in another month or so might go the way of the vinegar bottle if you haven’t carefully planned for this year’s harvest.
Production Decisions
Ask yourself what you want to do differently this year, if anything. There are essentially two directions winemakers can go. Approach it with the “fix-it” mentality and/or the “stylistic change” mentality.
The fix-it mentality implies that there’s something that went wrong last year that you’re going to fix this time. For example one home winemaker found that after last harvest’s wine was bottled, the wine underwent a secondary fermentation in the bottle, resulting in a gassy wine. She will have to try to keep the microbial population down by
boosting her sanitation program and using a little extra sulfite powder when she bottles. She might even go so far as to borrow a sterile filtration unit.
An example of a stylistic change is as follows: Say you really like how your Zinfandel comes out every year, but you feel that you’d like to try for a wine with a bigger body and maybe a little bit more aging potential. You might try getting grapes with a sugar content around 24 or 25 Brix instead of the usual 22 to 23 (or add a bit of sugar to your concentrate). You might also try using some new oak for fermenting or aging in barrel and working out an extended maceration scheme that would ensure complete extraction of tannins and colored compounds from the grapes.
Stylistic changes can also be as simple as adding a bit more tartaric acid to the juice before fermentation or using a different brand of oak chips.
Whether stylistic or fix-it, production changes require that you take careful notes. You should know all about last year’s harvest: How you set up, how the wine progressed from fermenter to storage, and how the wine tasted. One of the easiest ways to keep on top of all this kind of information is to keep a “harvest notebook” or a computer spreadsheet program that lets you take notes along the way. Recording your tasting notes is necessary as well, so you can track the sensory development of your wine as it ages. Leaf through last harvest’s notes.
Cleaning and Sanitizing
There’s a saying in the wine world that “wine just makes itself.” To a certain extent this is true. But it is impossible for good wine to just “happen” if opportunistic microbes, insects, and other threats are left to take over what would normally be a healthy wine. It’s critical that cleaning and sanitizing your work area and equipment be part of any pre-crush preparation plan.
To begin, it’s probably necessary to define some terminology. Winemakers should use the word “sanitize” as opposed to “sterilize” when referring to knocking down microbiological populations on equipment or tools. Sterilization implies that an item is completely devoid of biological life. So home winemakers are left with only the ability to sanitize, something that very hot water, strong sulfite solutions, and other readily available preparations do very well.
When sanitizing look out for sources of contamination and eliminate them in a systematic way. Put yourself in the place of a fruit fly, and pretend that you’re a dust mote falling from that clogged ventilation duct above your fermentation area if you need to get into the swing of things.
By avoiding chlorine during cleaning and sanitizing, you can avoid the production of trichloroanisole (the stinky compound that signifies a wine has “cork” spoilage) when the wine is later bottled and corked. Do not use any chlorinated products on tools or equipment that might come in contact with the grapes, must, or wine.
1) Remove any visible soil, rust, or buildup.
2) Apply a non-chlorinated cleaning solution such as trisodium phosphate, TSP, with water as hot as is suitable for the material. Scrub well and rinse repeatedly with clean water.
3) Apply a sanitizing solution. Use chlorine for floors, outsides of equipment, and other surfaces that won’t come in contact with the wine. Use strong sulfite solution (60 milligrams per liter) for those areas that do. Rinse, in the case of the chlorinated products.
Equipping the Winery
These final preparations might seem like no-brainers, but it’s easy for people to forget to order a new batch of standards for their pH meter or to get that extra bucket out of the attic. Just as in cooking, it’s advisable to have assembled and ready to go all the equipment and ingredients you’re going to need to make your wine.
Collecting the ingredients is the fun part. As in any recipe, it’s exciting to see the actual liquids, powders, and organic matter with which you’ll be working your winemaking magic. Chemical reagents used in wine analysis, especially, are age sensitive. They need to be purchased fresh every year and can be ordered through home winemaking supply stores, catalogs, and over the Internet. Yeast is another ingredient that needs to be freshly purchased. Never use dry yeast that has been sitting around for more than six months; you could be left with a stuck fermentation or a stinky wine if the yeast isn’t at its peak of health. If you’re using fresh fruit to make your wine, make sure that it hasn’t been sprayed with any chemicals or dusted with any antifungal powders within two weeks of use. Some of these chemicals are harmful to yeast and might cause an unhealthy fermentation.
Have all the equipment on hand, including everything from thermometers to crusher-destemmers. Make sure that the equipment that you have is in working order and won’t break down just when you need it most. Put it all in a spot that’s easy to get to. If you’re going to be renting equipment, firm up those arrangements.
A little planning can go a long way to maximizing your chances for making this harvest your best ever.