It's Kinda Like That....

Each Monday at BOW we have our gathering of ideas, gripes, queries, excited observations, and occasional bewilderment. We call it our staff meeting. We've held these since before we opened our doors and I occasionally wonder whether we should be spending precious funds in the slower winter months asking people to come in for a few hours of generalized jawboning. (Sometimes the jawbone is cordially persuasive, occasionally it's used as a club, more often than not it is used by staff to inform and educate management.) At the end of the day we all agree that these meetings are the best way to prepare for the challenging enjoyment of working with the public. It's fair to say that we are all at BOW because we really enjoy serving and assisting and sharing our enthusiasm and educating and telling our stories. But imagine doing that with fifty strangers over seven hours and you can see that it might be a challenge for us all.

The results of all of this effort are gratifying. Sharon and I get to hear wonderful thanks and congratulations from our customers about how great our staff is. They are great! And like anything that is done well, they work hard to excel. They study about wine. They try it at other wineries. They ask us questions and want to learn more. Each week we focus on some aspect of the business and it often regards the production process. This week we did a tasting trial on our Seyval Blanc , Traminette, and Rose.

These wines are still in tank and won't be bottled until the spring. But they are getting close to final maturation and we still have the chance to work with them to get them right. Monday we were considering the effect that enzymes have on the wine's flavor and aromas. "After crushing, negatively charged pectin molecules form a protective layer around positively charged grape solid particles. This keeps the grape solid particles in suspension. The main enzymes used during winemaking are pectinases. Pectinases occur naturally in all fruit - including grapes - and are partly responsible for the ripening process. Pectinase enzymes break the pectin molecules into smaller components thereby exposing some of the positively charged grape solid particles underneath this protective layer. These positive charges bind to the negative charges of the pectin-protected grape solids and bigger particles form. When particles become too big, they settle out." This information is from the online resource Wineboer and makes for dry (pun intended) but fascinating reading.

http://www.wynboer.co.za/recentarticles/0411enzymes.php3

What this chemistry really boils down to is that by understanding the naturally occurring processes of wine creation, we can maximize the role of the enzymes in post-fermentation to further bring out the favorable aspects of the grape in the wine. This is because enzymes clean up the wine by separating the desirable from the undesirable. I find this amazing! By knowing the chemistry of winemaking, we can actively engage in the winemaking process and make certain that the magic of great winemaking occurs when and as it should, rather than risking that it fails to happen at all. -When you think about it, It's kinda like romance in a way...it takes a little work to make certain that it actually happens.

Now as our winemakers, my lovely wife or certainly her gifted colleague Rick might be appalled at my over-simplification of this complex and somewhat secretive process. Of course I don't really care because I want everyone to know that I nearly flunked chemistry and this is chemistry! And I'm starting to get it now! As someone new to this business, I am amazed at what we have been learning! It is exciting to think that when Chemistry 101 is applied to "living the dream", it actually starts to make lots of sense! It is so much fun learning these things. It is fun to realize that because of science, we can be a part of the natural role of ions, molecules, and particles in wine making. As a result, we can make better wine! In the old days, enzymes were an unknown part of the winemaking process. They were part of the magic that made one wine great and the other awful. It is fun to know that our wine can be better because we know about these processes and can actively participate in them to create the very best possible 100% natural, quality wine. To me it's like that 1960s movie "Fantastic Voyage" where they shrank the scientists and injected them into some guy's bloodstream to actually see and fix what wasn't working on the inside. Those guys were the enzymes. Cool!

So there we were testing and tasting several different versions of the same wine on Monday. Ten of us were gathered around the table. The sun shone from above and between us, and the glasses were beautifully and sparingly filled with samples of liquid joyfulness. From left to right each of our four glasses held the baseline sample of the wine currently in tank, followed by three glasses with slightly increasing amounts of enzyme. Of course, it is possible to have too much of a good thing --much as has empirically proven when eating unlimited supplies of M&Ms. In like fashio, the last glass was not necessarily the best glass.

It was quiet in the room except for slurping, swishing, and spitting noises. We all had standard evaluation sheets and the grand aromatics wheel of wine descriptors. We were all learning about what makes a wine good. We were also practicing our tasting and discriminating skills with the samples while providing Rick and Sharon with real world information that would help them with their own choices. We're all regular folks who like wine. Other than Rick, Kristin, and Sharon, I am not ashamed to say that there was not a qualified taster among us. Armed only with our palates and common sense we were being asked to have an influence on the final product and again I repeat: this is where the fun was! Tasting and proving the wines represented a creative nexus of imagination, knowledge, opinion, and happenstance. So cool! And I don't think that I was the only one enjoying the moment.

What did we decide? Well, consensus wasn't reached, but there was general agreement. Sharon and Rick seemed satisfied that they had some guidance from the peanut gallery and we all felt that we had learned while contributing to the welfare of the business. Will our efforts translate into better wine? I guess the verdict will be out until you try it later this spring!

Cheers.