Читать книгу The Wine Etiquette Guide - Your Defense Against Wine Snobbery - Chuck Blethen - Страница 9

“Be careful to trust a person, who does not like wine”

- Karl Marx

Winemaking is essentially turning an agricultural product – grapes - into an alcoholic beverage. The primary steps of winemaking include crushing the grapes to expose the yeast to the sugar inside the grape, fermenting the must (grape pulp, juice, seeds, stems, leaves, etc.) until it is wine and then bottling it. (Take it on good faith that this is a gross over-simplification of the winemaking process.) Making variations in the process produces different wines.

Wines can be sweet (containing a noticeable amount of residual sugar, usually ranging from 1 to 3%) or dry (no detectable amount of sugar). It has been my personal observation that wine drinkers’ tastes in wines change over the years. Most Americans begin by drinking sweet wines. As their tastes mature and their knowledge of wines increases, they gradually migrate towards the dryer wines. No matter what your tastes in wine, there is a plethora of wines available to suit everybody’s personal preferences.

White wines are made from white (green) or pink grapes. The color comes from the grape skins. White wines are crushed and fermented away from the skins and seeds.

Blush wines are made from pink, red or black grapes. They are fermented in contact with the skins for a very short time to allow the wine to leach out just a little of the color.

Red wines are made from red, purple, and black grapes and are fermented in close contact with the skins and seeds for an extended amount of time to allow the wine to leach out the maximum amount of color. This extended time results in a deep purple/red color you see in a red wine.

Sparkling wines are made in the same fashion as the white or blush wines mentioned above. The difference is the manner in which sparkling wines are made to take on a high concentration of carbon dioxide to give them their characteristic bubbles when opened. Some wineries inject carbon dioxide at the time of bottling. The original French process requires very exacting secondary fermentation in the bottle (See Appendix E).

Fortified wines like sherries (made from white grapes) and ports (made from red grapes) have had sugar added to the must to make a wine with a higher concentration of alcohol. Sometimes there is a direct addition of alcohol to the wine to immediately give it a higher alcohol concentration. Cognacs are made by double distilling the wines from the Cognac region of France.

Grappa is Italian “white lightening” or “moonshine”. If you spend any time around winemakers (especially the Italians) you will hear about grappa.

Grappa is also known by other names. It is called Marc in France, Aguardiente in Spain and Portugal, and in Germany it's known as Tresterschnapps. When making wine there is a small amount of left-over fermented material. This material – sometimes called “pomace” or the “lees” - contains 9% to 15% alcohol. Putting it through a still concentrates the alcohol to about 40-50 proof for a single-pass grappa, about 80-90 proof for a double-pass grappa, and 150-160 proof for a triple-distilled grappa.

Italians from the old country are always looking for a perfect grappa – one that retains the essence of the grape from which it is distilled. Some grappas do have a slightly distinguishable flavor of the grape… but like all wines, grappa is a distilled product and there are very wide ranges of “flavors” and alcohol content. Some people put various herbs in their grappa to give it a specific flavor. I have tasted grappa with anise, dill, basil, and other herbs – these are purported to be good digestives.

Anyone who has spent a lot of time around winemakers, especially Italian winemakers, will have run into grappa. It is also served in coffee (1 shot of grappa to a cup of coffee with cream and sugar) to make “cafe correcto.”