Holding lees prior to addition

Hey Clark,

We have been using PM Winemaking as a topic of discussion. My crew tells me I’m post modern.

So … lees. If we don’t want them with some wine for a while, what do we do in the interim? Have you cleverly figured a system for storing lees? As a tiny producer options like freezing would work for me. I use freezers regularly, 55 gal drums are great for cryo- extraction.

Thanks for putting out the book, good food for thought.

Regards, Paul

Hi Paul,

Glad you are finding the book useful.

Lees can be left at the bottom of the tank or barrel, and do not cause trouble in young red wines unless they are stirred, in which case they will attack monomeric anthocyanins and lead to dryness.

Be sure to distinguish fine lees from gross lees, which should be racked off of at the earliest moment post fermentation. The fine lees are anything that moves.

Some wineries consolidate lees in bruts or drums. They will take care of themselves remarkably well if stirred each day with a paddle.  Sometimes an aeration bubbler is set up on a timer to kick up the lees every six hours or so.  The key is to prevent clear wine on the top.

Generally lees can be recombined after 100 days or so.  If you don’t have a spectrophotometer, just acidify 50 mls of the wine in a glass to pH 2.0 with sulfuric acid and compare with a glass of the unacidified wine.  When there is little or no change, your pigment polymerization is complete and it is safe to add lees back to coat the structure.

Clark

Brett in old wines

Hi Clark,

I have been meaning to ask you this question for a while:

Why we never see anyone saying that an old bottle of wine (let’s say older than 20 years) has Brett (or high levels of 4-EP if you prefer)?

I don’t know if you agree with this proposition, but I don’t recall ever in my life having opened an old bottle and going “ouch! barnyard!!”. Assuming that it had Brett in its youth, what happened?

Very best,

Luiz Alberto, #winelover
Founder & CEO
Member of the Circle of Wine Writers

—————————————————————————

Luis,

This is an area of some controversy.  To begin with, I have seen plenty of old bottles that are quite Bretty.  But I also observe that the apparent Brett has everything to do with the integrative power of the wine’s structure, which will vary over time.

4-ethyl phenol (4-EP) is not synonymous with Brett, merely a good indicator.  It smells like shoe polish and is not particularly offensive on its own.  Linda Bisson at U.C. Davis has shown that the Brett genome varies wildly from country to country, and doesn’t even have a stable number of  chromosomes. As a result, the mix of 4-EP, 4-ethyl guaiacol (a smoky/meaty aroma), isovaleric acid (the vomit small), VA and the mousy compounds varies greatly among strains and vigor within a strain.  The constituents of the wine are also important.  White wines have no coumaric  and ferulic acids, the precursors to 4-EP and 4-EG, and thus smell entirely different.

It is also possible that some of these constituents, such as the volatile phenols and iso-valeric acid (the vomit smell) react with other wine constituents to render themselves non-volatile or even pleasant.  T my knowledge, we haven’t studied this enough to know.  Finally, the masking effects of the wine’s overall aromatic development may incorporate an originally pronounced Animalia into something less apparent and even profound.

I certainly experience in sulfite free reds a “dump” of phenolics about three years into barrel ageing in which the wine appears to shed its skin and emerge as a well-integrated whole.  I would liken this to the transformation from ruby to tawny port, except that there is an active microbial component to the transformed aromas.

Clark

Use of oak chips/powder/staves

Q: Is eliminating the barrel from the equation eliminating the romance of a cellar full of barrels? And do consumers care to know that their wine was oaked in a more cost effective fashion?

-Roger

A:

There is nothing romantic about the corpses of 200-year-old French oak trees stacked in their thousands to impress the tourists.  It’s as reprehensible as it is unnecessary and wasteful.

Don’t get me wrong. I love what a barrel does in terms of slow aging, settling, marrying, and combining oxidative and reductive chemistries to create amazing aromatic complexities.  But a fifty-year-old barrel, just like an old violin or guitar, does these things so much better than a new barrel.  Barrels ought to be cherished and outlive their buyers.

Instead, all over Bordeaux, La Rioja and California, barrels are cut up for firewood after a single filling.  It’s environmentally reprehensible and makes terrible wine.  Well-made chips made from the 75% of perfect wood left over from the barrel construction process and roasted in rolling drums like coffee beans are much easier to control in extracting the proper compounds in the right amounts.

You won’t find a lot of winemakers who’ll tell you this, but it’s a point of view I feel strongly about, the subject of a whole chapter in Postmodern Winemaking.  Consumers should also consider that this ridiculous practice adds about $10 to the cost of their wine.

In my colleagues’ defense, I will stipulate that there are an awful lot of badly made barrel alternatives out there, but there are also plenty of lousy barrels, and even the best have technical problems intrinsic to the challenge of firing a barrel for flavor simultaneously with its real job, which is to bend the staves.  Also, barrels have their untoasted wood buried deep in the stave where it rests until the wine has penetrated deep enough to extract it, just at the worst time, immediately before bottling.

Winemakers are an extremely conservative bunch, and barrels are all they know. Every year, alternatives improve in quality and more and more winemakers come into my camp as they cautiously experiment with them.  We all can help by educating consumers about the logic of barrel conservation, even for the top wines.  I haven’t bought a new barrel in twenty years, and you can bet I age my $100 Cabernet in the oldest barrels I can find.  If I need oak extractives, I will use chips.  So shoot me.