Murderous high season in the basement

Autumn is peak season in the vineyards.

Everyone knows that.

And winter is peak season in the wine cellar.

Hardly anyone knows that.

But what exactly is happening there?

The grape juice has been slumbering and fermenting for a few weeks now. It's a very relaxed process. We, on the other hand, are hopping around the barrels like excited squirrels, carefully monitoring the development. We have to kill the yeast at the exact moment the right residual sweetness is reached. Otherwise, they'll continue fermenting and turn our beautiful wine into vinegar.

And how do you kill yeast?

With cold. If the temperature drops below 7 degrees Celsius, they become sick. Shortly before freezing, fermentation has finished, and the spent yeast slowly sinks to the bottom. This takes quite a bit of time (like the dying Violetta in the opera La Traviata). So we wait a few days until the next step:

The wine is racked

Sorry, this newsletter sounds a bit brutal this time. But that's actually what it's called. This is done by very carefully siphoning off the wine from the top and gradually moving further down... until we're just above the dead lees. We leave the cloudy residue in the barrel. And then the next step follows immediately:

The wine is “beautified”

Despite all the care, the wine is still a bit cloudy and doesn't look particularly appetizing. Therefore, it is now filtered until it is just beautiful—that is, until it has a bright color, shines, and presents itself beautifully. At this stage, it is called young wine.

Now comes the chemical test

After the young wine has been made beautiful, it is analyzed meticulously. At this point, all winemakers become chemists, meticulously examining the important measurable parameters that define a wine, such as residual sweetness, sugar, sulfur content—and, more recently, carbohydrates and nutritional values.

And then it’s time to season!

The next step is the sensory test, which focuses primarily on two parameters: the right balance between sweetness and acidity. We can influence this nuances through two measures:

1. If the wine is not sweet enough

...we winemakers have a secret weapon: the "sweet reserve." This is pure grape juice, carefully added until the dryness (sugar) content reaches its exact level. This allows us to compensate for any vintage whims caused, for example, by a lack of sun.

2. If the wine is too acidic

...we force it to expel the acid. We do this by chilling the young wine again. This causes the tartaric acid to crystallize and cling to the barrel walls and bottom. This so-called tartar must then be laboriously removed later – a job for people who love cleaning.

Wine diamonds

Cream of tartar, by the way, is a crystal. Red cream of tartar is black, but white cream of tartar glitters and sparkles! There are even some experimental people who have made jewelry out of these "wine diamonds." This seems to be an isolated case, though. Most of the time, we don't even throw away the cream of tartar, because if we store it carefully, we can pulverize it and add it back in another year when we're lacking acidity. Nothing gets lost!

Try, try, and try again

How many times do you think a wine like this is tasted until it is finally perfect and can be bottled?

- 30 times?

- 70 times?

- Not enough! It's tasted about 100 times!

Now you might be thinking that this is a wonderful life... constantly enjoying wine, and doing it full-time! A side occupational risk: constant intoxication. But it's not quite like that. To avoid drinking ourselves into a trance, we only sip the wine on our palate, savor it with great concentration, and don't swallow it. It's a shame, but sensible. In technical terms, this tasting is called "sensory testing."

All this is happening in the basement—right now! Would you have known?

And in the vineyards, pruning is underway at the same time, even in frost. ( We've already reported on this .) So we're freezing both above and below ground, because the temperature in the cellar is a constant 16 degrees. Sometimes we're glad to be back in the warm office in front of the computer and busy ourselves with accounting, taxes, marketing, purchasing, and administration.

Your constantly wine-tasting yet sober counts