Vinnez – April 2010

Notes from the 2010 Harvest

What a great trip!! Over a two week period I had 12 of my closest friends travel to Mendoza to share my first harvest at Chaiken Vineyards. In addition to touring the vineyard, we visited the newly built winery, met with the consulting winemakers, and sampled some of the best food in Argentina.
 
OK, here’s the news on the harvest. Due to a relatively cool summer, harvest was delayed almost two weeks. Although this prevented me from seeing the malbec being picked, it does offer great hope for the wines. Warm days were followed by cool evenings allowing the sugars and acidity to be in balance, which means more interesting and flavorful wines.
 
On my last visit to the vineyard our winemakers were blind tasting all the grapes from every vineyard determining the right day for picking. Although winemakers use equipment to measure BRIX (sugar levels), nothing is more important than how the grapes taste. Amazingly, each winemaker tastes more than four pounds during one of these sessions. Winemakers grade the grapes A, B, or C with A the highest rating. So how did we do? We got an A!!
 
Harvest of the our malbec began the week of April 5th. Primary fermentation takes place over a two week period for each varietal with the malbec followed by syrah, cabernet franc, and then cabernet sauvignon. I should be getting a report on the how it’s all going real soon. Right now everyone both in Mendoza and here in the U.S. are excited about it all.
 
Cheers.

Sincerely,
 
Barry P. Chaiken, Proprietor
Chaiken Vineyards
info@chaikenvineyards.com

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Winemaking – An Overview

Winemaking, or vinification, is the production of wine, starting with selection of the grapes or other produce and ending with bottling the finished wine.
 
Winemaking can be divided into two general categories: still wine production (without carbonation) and sparkling wine production (with carbonation). The science of wine and winemaking is known as oenology (in American English, enology).
 
Red wine is made from the must (pulp) of red or black grapes that undergo fermentation together with the grape skins, while white wine is usually made by fermenting juice pressed from white grapes, but can also be made from must extracted from red grapes with minimal contact with the grapes’ skins. Rosé wines are made from red grapes where the juice is allowed to stay in contact with the dark skins long enough to pick up a pinkish color, but little of the tannins contained in the skins.
 
During this primary fermentation, which often takes between one and two weeks, yeast converts most of the sugars in the grape juice into ethanol (alcohol) and carbon dioxide. After the primary fermentation, the liquid is transferred to vessels for the secondary fermentation. Here, the remaining sugars are slowly converted into alcohol. Some wines are then allowed to age in oak barrels before bottling, which add extra aromas to the wine (e.g., our Generaciones wines), while others are bottled directly. Still others may be aged in stainless steel tanks (We add oak staves to the tank holding our Malbec to enhance the aromas).
 
However, only about 10% of all red and 5% of white wine will taste better after five years than it will after just one year. Depending on the quality of grape and the target wine style, some of these steps may be combined or omitted to achieve the particular goals of the winemaker. Many wines of comparable quality are produced using similar but distinctly different approaches to their production; quality is dictated by the attributes of the starting material – which is why we practice strict vineyard management and perform two step berry selection to choose only the best grapes – and not necessarily the steps taken during vinification.
 
Variations on the above procedure exist. With sparkling wines such as Champagne, an additional fermentation takes place inside the bottle, trapping carbon dioxide and creating the characteristic bubbles. Sweet wines are made by ensuring that some residual sugar remains after fermentation is completed. This can be done by harvesting late (late harvest wine), freezing the grapes to concentrate the sugar (ice wine), or adding a substance to kill the remaining yeast before fermentation is completed; for example, high proof brandy is added when making port wine. In other cases the winemaker may choose to hold back some of the sweet grape juice and add it to the wine after the fermentation is done, a technique known as süssreserve.
 
Source: Wikipedia