Aaron Berdofe's Wine and Food Experience

The best wine is made in…the garage?

Do you ever wonder how many wine critics and writers have actually made wine? I’m not talking about a lifetime of wine making before putting up their wine thieves and turning to writing and criticizing, but just making a batch of homemade wine.  The answer, as you can probably assume, is well under 5% of professional wine writers and critics.  Admittedly, I have not done a complete survey of those in the trade and I can most certainly find exceptions, but recently I picked up the New York Times’ anthology of their wine articles over the past 30 years (more on that in the future) and it has left me with some lingering doubts.  I make this accusation, not from a high horse of self-serving sanctimony, as I myself had never embarked upon a wine making journey until recently, but from a self-disciplined critique of my own limited body of knowledge.   How can one, after all, make comment on a final product, without truly experiencing how it is made?

This is much like “Tech Writers” making critique on the latest iPhone model and its lack of ability to direct them to the correct Starbucks.  Their own electronics manufacturing and software development experience may never have exceeded cleaning the dark colored grit off of their mouse every few weeks, but still they comment.  The title of my wee little blog has been The Wine and Food Experience for a reason. Is experience not the best educator?

One may have noticed that I don’t do any critiquing of wines here.  Sure, I poke fun at wines that are made specifically to cost a certain amount, but I don’t have a 100 point scale and I never, ever review a wine for the sake of reviewing a wine.  I’m focused on my singular experience with a wine and usually its accompaniment with food.  However, I realized in my semi-professional career as a Wine Guy (official title) that I may be asked to judge wine at some point where my opinion would actually have an impact on people who produce the stuff.  Needless to say, I couldn’t tell someone they didn’t de-gas their wine enough which led to an unpleasant prickling on my tongue as I sipped when I haven’t de-gassed a wine myself, now could I?  Shameless.

So a few weeks ago I headed to Northern Brewer , a nationally renown retailer of home brewing equipment and picked up all the goodies for making some wine.  I had just started a full bathroom remodel on an off week from traveling and I figured why not add something else to the plate?  I settled for making an off-dry Gewürztraminer because I wanted some latitude with the amount of finesse needed and most importantly, it was the cheapest option. No, I didn’t crush my own grapes, I just bought a “wine kit” which comes with the juice in concentrated form, the additives, and the yeast.  Amazingly convenient!

Now, wine making is not overly difficult by any means.  People have been doing it for thousands of years with fewer of the tools available than I picked up in 5 minutes of shopping.  But to do it well, takes care.  For you, I have compiled some general lessons from the field of small-batch wine making that transfer into your experience.  I’ll be giving out bottles as soon as it’s bottled, so some of you may get early Christmas presents!

Guess what’s going in your stocking?

Clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean.  It is so easy to get things dirty when you’re making wine.  Dropping things into cloudy juice and needing to fish them out, for example.  Taking samples, the transferring, the pouring, the mixing; every step is a disaster area waiting to happen.  If you’ve ever had a sense of dirtiness when you are tasting wine, you’re witnessing a slip in hygiene.  I’m not talking about the “Sitting in a rustic barn, with faint wisps of manure” dirtiness, I’m talking about the “Something just died in my mouth” dirtiness.  This is why most wineries put custodial duties at the top of their priority list.

The right tools, however few, are essential.  Northern Brewers basic wine kit was missing a few things in my opinion: A wine thief (the thing you see people dipping into barrels to take out wine samples), a thermometer, pH testing strips, and a drill-mounted mixing tool.

A note on additives.  Wine is held in high esteem by a large number of people because making it is generally a reductive process.  Some people also get very high and mighty about this.  In its purest form, the winemaker merely shepards the grapes from their round form into an alcoholic beverage.  This is called Natural winemaking.  They use the yeast that comes naturally on the grapes, no sulphur , no nothin’.  99% of winemakers want their wine to last more than a few months in the bottle and therefore at least add a singular additive of Sulphur. These same winemakers also choose to inoculate their wine juice with chosen yeast strands instead of the natural yeast.  Of course, there are a whole host of things that can be added and done to the wine that aren’t necessarily in that “pure” realm.  Here’s the list of acceptable additives for wine in the U.S. and the list of acceptable processes.  If you’d prefer to drink your wine without an edge of disgust, you should probably avoid clicking on those links.  BUT, additives do actually serve a purpose.  The ensure that fermentation happens, they make the wine clear and not cloudy, they smooth out the flavor, etc. and so forth.  So if you absolutely demand consistent wine, that’s perfectly clear at a cheap price, it’s best not to get worked up about additives.  For my endeavor I added Yeast to convert sugar to alcohol, Bentonite for stabilization before fermentation, Metabisulphite for preservation, Sorbate to control foaming, and Isinglass for clarity.  Now most of these small amounts of additives latch on to particles in the wine and drag them to the bottom which are left in the bottom of the tanks before being bottled, so wine can still claim to be a reductive process.