Homemade & Commercial

Wine, Beer, Spirits, Cider & Mead Guides

Alcoholic beverages; most commonly beer and wines made at home. Brews made from brewing kits purchased at shops specialized in spirits. The Beer Pirate features homebrew recipes, equipment requirements, and commercial productions information; and all the best practices needed to make that perfect batch!

Wine gifts for the discriminate wine taster.

Examine your glass of wine. This is not actually tasting, to be sure. But color is extremely important to our appetites, and the color of a wine can have tremendous appeal. A well made wine is a mighty fine sight. To be enjoyed fully it.should be served in fine glasses-simple and clear-so that it may shine to its best advantage. Wine served otherwise is being sold short.

Once the color and sparkle of the wine have been appreciated, it is time to begin the tasting. Our experience of tasting involves four separate factors: bouquet or the nose of the wine; aroma or the peculiar sensation of smelling internally inside the mouth; body or the feel of the alcoholic content of the wine; and finish or those sensations which linger in the mouth when the wine has been swallowed. And so, the business of tasting a wine is nothing more than weighing the pleasure you find in each of these factors-bouquet, aroma, body and finish-and discovering how well your pleasures stack up.

Begin by sniffing the wine. Sniff it. Don’t inhale it in a furious snort. Hold the glass three or four inches below your nose and gingerly take in two or three whiffs of the perfume. Hold those little whiffs in your nose until you feel them ooze into the back of your throat. Exhale completely and swallow, freeing your head of the smell completely. Repeat the entire sniffing process-two or three times if you are enjoying yourself. Now, bring your nose directly over the rim of the glass and very slowly and steadily breathe in the complete bouquet of the wine. What you now fill your head with cannot be described as anything but a bouquet-a combination of all the perfumes in the wine. If it is a good wine, the bouquet has cleanliness and freshness as well as a haunting compound of odors, a firm sweetness binding the whole. If there is the faintest trace of sourness, bitterness, mustiness, sulphur or mould, we know immediately the wine is inferior.

One deep breath of a fine bouquet is hardly enough. Why not enjoy such a pleasure? Breathe again. You may discover a few delightful sensations you missed the first time. And you may just as well know, at this point, very few wines are as wonderful as their smell. When somebody describes a wine as “great” this is what he means: its aroma, body and finish are in the same league with its bouquet.

Next, investigate the aroma. Take a good, bold sip of the wine. Hold it firmly in your mouth. You will notice at once the perfumes you smelled in the bouquet are suddenly present inside your mouth. You seem to be feeling the smell of the wine as though the smell were tangible. You will know whether all the bouquet is there or whether some of it has faltered on the way and been lost. You will decide whether new perfumes are present. And you will decide for yourself whether all the various odors are as delightful in the mouth as they were in the nose. This will be your judgment of the aroma.

Now you slurp the wine around in your mouth as you set about judging the body of the wine. Some Americans look on this operation as being somewhat vulgar, like dunking petits fours in a teacup. Actually that slurping, complete with whatever gurgling sounds it may produce, is an essential part of wine-tasting. After a little practice, you can hold the gurgling down to something less clamorous than faulty plumbing, but it is not until it has come in contact with the entire lining of the mouth that the body of the wine is felt. The body is the alcohol; this is what causes the faintly burning sensation which now fills the mouth. It appears to give the wine a feeling of substance or lack of substance. Quite often we are almost automatically tempted to chew a wine, it feels so substantial. Such a wine we describe as “full-bodied.” Then as the wine is swallowed a warmth wells in the back of the throat, and the fine qualities of the alcohol and the gentleness of the heat blend with the lingering bouquet and aroma.

You swallow; and what is left is the finish. This is quite often the most dazzling part of wine-tasting. Among people who are just learning how to taste, it often is the most vivid part of tasting. This is particularly true if the wine is a fine one, for all of a sudden one is aware of lingering fragrances which have heretofore been undetected: they suddenly permeate the mouth and nose. This finish seems to be a recapitulation of all the charm-from the first whiff of bouquet to the final swallow-and the pleasure is considerably enhanced by the knowledge that it is a transitory pleasure, that like a sunset or a sweet chord of music, it can be treasured only in one’s memory.

This, in effect, is the process of tasting a wine. Developing a wine-tasting technique requires much patience, but it should be a pleasure.

We are first aware of our power to taste food when we are weaned from the maternal breast. From that cruel and difficult period we battle to assert our own gastronomical individuality. The going is often hard. We are continually disturbed by the advances in dietetics, in medicine, the never ending development of hygienic chaff or uncooked cereal, the enriching of flour and the sanitary skimming of milk. We learn unenthusiastically what a carrot tastes like raw, what it is like if it’s boiled, creamed, or candied. We learn to rise in rebellion against the smell of uncooked sea food or cooking cabbage.

By the time we have emerged from adolescence, we have been so conditioned by so many foods that the mere mention of any of them brings their taste to mind almost as sharply as the actual food. Without effort we have developed a vast store of taste memories. We have never had these tastes described to us. No one has told us to moisten our lips with vegetable soup, let its perfumes fill our nasal cavities or let it roll easily against the mucous membrane. The order was spare and firm: “Eat it-or else!” And after that order was repeated a few hundred times, we pretty well knew what vegetable soup tasted like.

No one ever bawled out to us: “Drink that Mouton-Rothschild ‘72-or else!” or “That’s perfectly good Chateau d’Yquem ‘20.” The fact is that less than 10 per cent of our adult population tasted wine before it was eighteen years old, and that 10 per cent includes those of us whose introduction to wine was a serving of a purple-black liquid in a coffee cup in the place Joe had sent us to. The taste was hardly something to put into one’s memory book of pleasant sensations. So now it is just because we have such a generous store of food tastes in our memories and practically no memory of wine tastes that we are quite self-conscious about the mechanics of memorizing wine tastes. Like piano lessons, roller skating, or blowing chewing-gum bubbles, learning to memorize tastes seems to belong to childhood.

This, of course, is absurd. For even if we were fed wine on mama’s knee and were reared in a house where the wine carafe was as much a part of the table setting as knife or fork, the chances are quite slight we would be able to identify as many as half a dozen wines and those only as “Uncle Mayer’s wine,” or “Aunt Giovanna’s wine,” or “Cousin Mignon’s” or “the wine from the little cask.” That such wines were Burgundies, clarets, Rieslings, or Chiantis, or that they were of a certain vintage, or were worthy of adjectives other than “good” or “sour,” we would not have dreamed. They went down our throats with the rest of the food, and were no more contemplated than the potato pancakes, spaghetti,or sour-dough bread which accompanied them as the rush was made to be up from the table and away.

No. Wine-tasting is an adult business which comes only with a developing love of food. It did not belong to childhood or adolescence, when food bulk was infinitely more important to us than food quality. The first thing we must do in order to taste a wine, therefore, is to shed any self-consciousness we may have about learning how to taste-now that we are past childhood.

At first the act of drinking a glass of wine appears to be a pretty self-conscious ceremony in its own right. To those of us who are used to thinking in terms of aiming a whisky or gin for one’s stomach and getting it there in the shortest time by the straightest route, the act of drinking wine seems to be a rather stuffy rite. We take the glass in hand and imitate the wine-drinkers around us-we hold the glass to the light, twirl the stuff in the glass, sniff it, sip it, or gulp it, pump it around inside our mouths, swallow it, and haven’t the vaguest idea of whether or not it is good; in fact, we are so involved in the ritual of drinking that we don’t even know if we like the wine.

If the ceremonial of wine-drinkers leaves us stunned, their vocabulary may well defeat us completely. More people have been scared away from the enjoyment of wine by the florid language of the cognoscenti than by the high prices of the bottles. By the time one has heard a glass of wine apotheosized as “rather like the less sweet wallflower,” or patronized as “uncompromisingly Gallic in its patriotism,” or dramatized as “the Peter Pan vintage,” it is far more comforting to head for the nearest beer parlor and be at home with man.

Yet not all the language describing wine is balderdash. To learn how to taste wine, we must know beforehand what qualities to expect. Then we must find out how to discover those qualities. Finally, we will judge the wine on the basis of our findings, for not until then is our tasting completed.

Wine to the poet Keats may have been “a beaker full of the warm South,” to the cleric John Wesley, “one of the noblest cordials in Nature,” but actually wine is a concoction men have been bright enough to create from their knowledge of botany, geology, meteorology, physics and chemistry over a period of more than four thousand years. Wine of some sort has been made in every civilized country on earth. Grapes have been grown under all manner of climatic and soil conditions, in spite of or with the help of various yeasts, moulds and bacteria. They have been crushed by wooden paddles, by stones, by metal rollers, by naked and booted feet, and have been fermented and ripened in vessels of stone, oak, redwood and innumerable other materials. The wine produced has been drunk two weeks after the pressing in some cases and a hundred years later in others, and it has been stored in containers made of clay, stone, leather, brass, wood or glass before it was consumed. The chemical substances of the grape derived from the soil and the processes of fermentation along with the conditions of aging and storing, combine to produce the extremely complex solution which is wine. Water, sugar, acids, minerals, alcohols, saccharomyces, oils, esters and aldehydes combine to make the substance of wine, and naturally enough determine its flavor. Consequently, the taste of wine is as complex as its chemistry. So, if we. are seeking the “perfect wine,” we will be looking for a wine in which all the component tastes would be present individually and at the same time blended into a perfect whole-very much like our criteria for a work of art.

Wine is (1) naturally fermented; or (2) the fermentation is controlled by the addition of brandy or spirits; or (3) it is sparkling. Dry or sweet, red or white, for better or worse, it falls under one of these three headings. If we are to learn to judge wines, it is quite important for us to understand the three processes of production that determine the various categories.

Wine fermented naturally is generally called table wine or natural wine. It contains less than 14 per cent alcohol by volume and will turn to vinegar if exposed to air for long. When we say “naturally fermented,” we do not mean the grape is merely pressed and left to fend for itself. It well might be were it not for many enemy bacteria, which, fortunately, man can control.

It has taken hundreds of years of our burgeoning chemical intelligence to perfect the palatable wines we have today, and it has required an enormous degree and amount of technical skill and patience to produce sufficient wine to satisfy the appetite of an ever-increasing population. So, in our time, we need not bewail a shortage as did once the Prophet Isaiah:

“There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone.”

Through advances in chemistry and technology, the naturally fermented wine industry has developed to a point where its supply is substantial enough to make it an important commodity in our national and international economy. But its “natural” development has not suffered from technological advances. We have produced no synthetic to take its place. We protect naturally fermented wine from its microbe enemies, we provide it with perfect temperature and weather conditions, we house it in just the vats and casks it needs, we bottle it hygienically and store it painstakingly, but in no way do we alter the natural processes of fermentation and ripening.

The harvest is naturally an important part of the winemaking process. The cutting of the bunches of grapes must be done with great care in order not to harm the vines, and the grapes must be moved quickly to the press lest they ferment prematurely. But the most important factors of the harvest are weather and time.

The grapes are harvested at exactly the moment when they contain the greatest amount of sugar and when their skins are most densely covered with saccharomyces, the tiny yeast organisms which form the pale fuzz on the berries. This yeast is the fermenting agent or catalyst which converts the sugar into ethyl alcohol. It does not appear until the grape is ripe, and where it comes from is a mystery; but without it fermentation cannot take place. A heavy rain will wash it away; a frost will kill it. Because the sugar content of the fruit is increased by each day of warm sunlight and the vitality of the yeast organisms is developed in the fresh air, it requires consummate skill for the winegrower to be able to time his harvest to the last possible moment before rain or frost.’

Each year growers in the variable weather areas of the temperate zone gamble their entire crop against the whim of the weather. One more day of sunshine-will it bring perfection or disaster? Year after year, the production of an entire season is lost in the violent five minutes of a shower or a hailstorm. This is the story you hear each year throughout Bordeaux, in Burgundy, in the Champagne country and along the Rhine, Mosel, and Saar rivers in Germany, where the finest grapes grow, where fine wine means so much.

Once the grapes have been safely picked, they are taken to the press. A bunch of grapes includes the stalk, the skin, the pulp, and the seeds or pips. A certain amount of stalk is pressed with the berries, for the stalk contains a small percentage of tannin and other acids which contribute considerably to the life of the wine. The stalks have a bitter astringent taste, so that in pressing the fruit the grower must take care to see that enough of the stalks are crushed to increase the lasting qualities of the wine but not enough to make it bitter. Since the tannin present in the stalks is also in the grapeskins, many vintners remove the stalks entirely and draw the necessary tannin from the skins.

On every step in winegrowing and winemaking there are two schools of thought. Quite naturally the grower or vintner who follows one method thinks his wine is considerably superior to his competitors’. But whatever the manufacturing technique, the quality of the grape is what determines the intrinsic worth of the wine. All the techniques in the world will not make first-class wine from third-class grapes. It is possible-if not probable-to produce a good wine from fine grapes even when the methods of production are slipshod. The finest grapes require the most care in cultivation, are most susceptible to plant diseases, bear the smallest quantities of fruit, and yield the least wine.

Rain, sun, and soil are the food of the grape. The health of the wine is determined by the ability of the beneficial microbes in it to fight off enemy bacteria. The character of the yeast ferments gives corresponding character to the wine. Thus, the yeasts which convert the juice of the Riesling grape into Rhine wine are not the same yeasts which make the Pinot Noir grape into Burgundy.