Malo WHAT?

Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.
- Roger Bacon

No, this is not an incorrectly spelled Hawai’ian word. It is the first part of a somewhat mysterious process called MALO-LACTIC FERMENTATION. I say mysterious because it was not until the mid 1980s that the process was accurately identified, analyzed, and mastered. Though this process was present in winemaking since wine was first made, it was not known what “it” actually was. Malo-lactic fermentation, AKA secondary fermentation, is a process that occurs naturally and transforms the harsher malic acid (HOOC.CHOH.CH2.COOH., for you techno geeks), think sour green apples, into the softer lactic acid, (HOOC.CHOH.CH3), think dairy products. In so doing, a portion of the malic acid is converted into carbon dioxide, (CO2), and mostly goes away.

This process is beneficial in wines with high acidity, especially red wines from cooler growing areas; whites gain from this secondary fermentation as acid is quite noticeable, due in part to the fact that their acidity is high. However, in warmer climates, or in warm years in cooler growing areas, e.g. the Loire or the Mosel, if the Malo-lactic fermentation takes place, it may actually reduce the quality of the wine by throwing it out of balance. This is so because the acid in whites such as Chenin Blanc and Riesling, have their wonderful fruitiness balanced by high acidity. If acidity is reduced too much, the wines taste flat and uninteresting.

Try not to get confused here. Secondary fermentation relates to MALO-LACTIC FERMENTATION. If you are thinking about what happens with champagnes and sparkling wines, theirs is a SECOND FERMENTATION in the bottle. The wines are fermented dry and then put back in the bottle with the addition of yeast and sugar to create a second fermentation.

Chardonnay is a grape that does well with secondary fermentation. This determines the quality we often refer to as buttery in a wine that has undergone malo-lactic fermentation. (This chemical is known as DIACETYL.) If this aroma is in balance with the fruit and acid, it adds a wonderful note of aromatic and taste complexity. If overdone, it can become objectionable to the point where the “butteryness” overpowers the fruit of the wine.


How can a wine maker control this secondary fermentation? Historically, this secondary fermentation occurred in the spring time when cellar temperatures warmed and there was still sugar remaining in the “new wine.” In a modern winery, the wine maker can add lactic bacteria soon after fermentation starts. This timing allows the bacteria a comfortable temperature range; an acid level that it can tolerate; and an alcohol level with which the bacteria are comfortable. Those lactic bacteria are a picky group!

In some cases, a wine maker may rack off the wines after fermentation and place the juice in older wooden vats or casks that have a history of causing secondary fermentation. This does take longer and delays release of the wine. There may also be other bacteria that can contaminate and spoil the wine, so the wine maker must be careful in his or her choices for cask or barrel secondary fermentation.

If a malo-lactic fermentation takes place after a wine is bottled, it can create unpleasant tastes, will put bubbles in the wine , and will be an uncontrolled secondary fermentation. The winemaker will have no way of knowing if his wine is balanced and complex, or flabby and uninteresting.

I will give you another article on when a secondary fermentation is desired, even required, in certain traditional sparkling wines from France. But remember, these wines have a traditional secondary fermentation in the bottle because, decades ago when the wines were first produced, wine makers did not know what was happening. After time, this process of "unknowing" became tradition and then tradition became regulation.

Making Wine 2-Ageing

As I said in my first post on wine technology, there is an ongoing discussion of wine technology and tradition; and now a new factor is in play-so-called truth in labeling laws and regulations. As we continue in the series, many issues will be addressed; for now we’ll talk about how wine ages and techniques traditionelle and techniques moderne.

Texture, taste, color, and sediment deposits are factors in red wine ageing. Pigmented tannins, combinations of tannins and anthocyanins, provide mouthfeel, texture, and color in red wines. These components, called phenolics, are produced, or rather extracted or leeched, when the wine grapes are pressed. Early on the chemical reactions are based on these pheloics’ reactions with acid in the wine. As the wine ages, either in cask or bottle, these reactions are influenced by the presence of oxygen introduced into the wine when pressed, transferred, racked, or bottled. As time goes by, good title for a song, huh?, these different chemicals come together, agglomerate, and eventually get too heavy to stay in suspension in the wine. Hence, we have sediments, changes in color, and changes in taste. This why a fifteen year old fine Bordeaux needs decanting: the sediments are the harsher components of the wine that have dropped out, producing a wine with more integrated flavors, a harmonious texture, mouthfeel, and a slightly brown tinged color from the deep purple where the wine started when it was born.

The traditional method for ageing red wines is in the cask with added time in the bottle, sometimes for decades with potential for a great wine to achieve a century mark. Or more.

Based on the results of this ageing process, if like and kind results can be achieved in a fraction of the time, should modern techniques be used to achieve the desired result? Winemakers have available methods for filtering solids to remove bitter components from the wine. Oak flavor and nuance can be achieved by using oak staves, chips, and, some say, oak saw dust. By a process of micro-oxygenation, winemakers can hasten chemical processes that used to take months or years. This is where a wine is saturated with micron size molecules of oxygen, which filter through the wine to replicate the more traditional ageing in barrels.

Ageing can also be hastened by storage at higher temperatures than in traditional cellars. Again, cellaring was to hold wines at a constant temperature to allow the ageing process to occur. If you cellar your wines for five years, and I micro-oxygenate my wines and store at a higher temperature for one year, and we have almost the same result, is one process authentic and the other dishonest? Is one method old fashioned and the other making use of sound wine making technology?

If I use modern technology, should I be required to say this on my wine label? For example: “This wine was micro-oxygenated for six days, thirteen hours, seven minutes and four seconds before being aged in non-reactive vats with oak staves five cm thick, two meters long, and in a paddle array of five staves for three months, two days, five hours and six minutes?” You get the idea.

If aged traditionally, whatever that means, should producers be required to say like and kind describing in minute detail their processes and cellar environments?

These are not easy questions.

Making Wine, Technology, Taste and Truth in Labeling 1

Making wine, at least the basic process, is the same as it was thousands of years ago. Ripe grapes get trodden, squashed, pressed, whatever, to extract the juice, which is high in sugar, around 20-23% of the total must weight. (Must is winespeak for grape juice to be made into wine.) The wild yeasts on the skins go to work and convert the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Wine!

Needless to say, this basic process evolved across the centuries. Wine making now starts where wine making formerly was complete. What I mean by that is, in the bad old days, there was a minimum of technology, people did not know what fermentation was or what caused it, and if it worked it worked. If it did not work, no vino.

What developed over the centuries is a large body of knowledge about soils, grape varieties, climate, micro-biology, temperature control, and the role many ingredients play in winemaking. This knowledge led to certain techniques which are still evolving. I am speaking here about: the use of wood, in barrels or in other ways; ingredients used in fining or clarifying the wine; micro-oxygenation; speeded up “aging” through temperature control. The list grows and is ever changing.

Many people are familiar with the general processes of wine making: Grapes are pressed, juice collected, fermented, the new wine, sooner or later, is separated from the lees, aged for a time in larger containers, then bottled and either released for sale immediately or cellared for a time until the winemaker determines the wine is ready for release.

Into this basic stream enter many variables. For red wines, one of the most crucial processes is how the winemaker chooses to age the wine. Tradition says that quality reds must be aged for a time in oak barrels, often times new, but generally not more than four seasons old. The reason for this is that oak is a fine grained wood. The barrels allow a certain amount of oxygen into the wine, but not too much, during its barrel aging but prevent excess leakage of the wine out of the barrel. In addition, there are chemicals in the wood that are extracted by the wine which become parts of the consumers perception of taste, texture, and quality.

Now this process, aging in oak, as you may expect, can take a long time. Quality red Bordeaux wines are generally in wood around two years. Rioja Gran Reservas, Chianti Reserva and Barolo and Barbaresco specify different aging requirements in order to achieve the afore mentioned titles. During the time of barrel aging many changes occur which can also be affected by temperature variations.

Some questions now in winemaking are: If an analysis of the specific results of barrel aging can be identified, and they can be replicated with the use of modern technology, can the results be the same? If the taste and texture are the same, is the wine being manipulated and the public being ripped off? Or is the winemaker simply making use of technology that can replace older but perhaps outdated traditional methods? Are the traditional techniques simply moving into a contemporary mode of execution? Are these new techniques simply part of an evolutionary process?

The traditionalists have substantial investments in their way of making wine. One French oak barrel, a barrique used for cellaring, can cost $1000. American white oak can cost $600-$800 per barrel. There is time involved as well. If it takes three or four years before release of a traditionally made wine, and someone can have the same results using modern technology, the cash flow situation has vastly improved. A winemaker who can sell top quality wine after two years certainly has less financial strain than were he or she required to wait four or five years to release the same wine.

For the modern winemaker the investment in technology is also substantial. Food processing equipment is expensive and there are many pitfalls before the finished product is ready.

In the next part of our mini-series we will look at some specific techniques and how they were used traditionally and how they have been modernized.

Do You Know Who’s in Your Family Tree?

When I say “family tree” I am not really referring to your more...interesting (?) distant, or not so distant, relatives. We all know about them! No, what family I am talking about here is the family of the grape; or grapes, actually, as there is more than one family of grapes.

People who make a living from studying vines are called ampelographers, or people who study vines. Vines are climbing plants and what distinguishes them from trees, even old, gnarly vines, is the fact that vines need support to grow. Trees have trunks; vines do not. Grape vines belong to a very large family of climbing plants; included in this large family of climbing plant is Boston ivy. Grapes belong to a genus in this large family; the grape branch of the family tree is known as Vitis.

Within this genus of grapes, there are several species, the most important for wine making being vitis vinifera. Further down the family tree we have individual varieties. These include about one thousand different varieties including cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, airen, pinot gris, pinot noir, sangiovese and all its clones, etc. Other species of grapes include those native to North America and Asia, none of which, with the possible exception of the Norton, produces wine that is of sufficient quality in taste and aroma to appeal to more than a local audience.

Once we get past the variety, we arrive at the clone level. There are different clones for most grape varieties. These clones are sometimes naturally occurring mutations and sometimes the result of growers working to isolate a set of particular characteristics to develop a clone of a variety that will do well in a certain climate or soil. Clones may exist, or be developed for low rainfall, intense sunshine, arid conditions, and so on.

The vine also has a root or rootstock. This is the part of the vine below the surface. After phylloxera devastated Europe in the 1800’s, vinifera scions, vine tops, were cloned on to American or New World, rootstocks as these rootstocks were already resistant to the mite. The critter was originally from North America. The American vines and phylloxera evolved together. Vitis vinifera had never seen one and had no resistance to its predation.

This was not as simple as it sounds. For a given location a suitable rootstock was needed. Not all rootstocks do well in all kinds of soil. So researchers had to find out what scions, tops, did well on what root stocks. They then needed to find out what soil types were best suited for these rootstocks.

While it is true that wine, or a wine like beverage, can be made from almost any fruit, it is Vitis Vinifera that steals the show for quality wine production around the world.

Chianti and Brunello

What an amazing pair of wines. Chianti everyone knows from endless caricatures of wine bottles wrapped in straw where the straw was worth more than the wine. In this incarnation, the poor SAN GIOVESE grape was subjected to horrendous handling and wine making practices. Rumor has it that the name means “Blood of Jove.” Well, he must have shed lots over the junk that was put in those bottles.

Fortunately, for Jove and all his pals on Mt. Olympus, the condition of Chianti has improved enormously. the growers in Tuscany are now making making quality wines from this wonderful grape, all the way from a simple Chianti to elegant Chianti Classico Riservas.

But hold on a second. Will the real San Giovese step forward? The reason for this is that there are any number of clones of SG thriving in Tuscany. There are so many that a twenty plus year project to identify and name and classify all the clones is still not finished.

So, hop on over to Montalcino for a minute. Anyone heard of Brunello di Montalcino? Brunello is the name of a clone of our old friend San Giovese. He happens to line around the town of Montalcino, hence the name........

It is almost hard to realize that these two wonderful wines are of the same grape. Chianti-medium bodied, fairly acidic, black plums, cherries, black raspberries, tobacco, leather, oak, dirt (this is good), depending on the quality level of the wine tasted.

Brunello-much more full bodied, expensive, redolent of dark cherries, black raspberries, wood, intense plum flavors If one were to taste the two wines side by side, one would notice no more than a passing resemblance between SG and B.

They live in different towns and areas and while they may be first or second cousins, they must be from distant parts of the family. Do a tasting: you buy a couple of Chiantis and have someone else buy a few bottles of Brunello. Do a blind tasting. That way, you get to try the two side by side and your tasting pal gets the big bill!

See what you think.