Читать книгу The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season - Richard Olney - Страница 11

Wines are of two sorts. The one whose consumption is the greatest—that known as gros rouge in France (its white equivalent is often called pousse au crime), the American counterpart of which would be those gallon jugs of cheap red wine—is a product essentially of the laboratory: a knowledgeable mixture of a number of inferior wines, more or less high in alcohol content. It has been subjected to violent clarification processes (known as “defecatory”), often involving the injection of horse’s blood into the wine. This is less shocking than it seems, for the blood, high in albumin content, acts merely as a precipitant for the impurities contained in suspension in all young wines. (Most fine wines are clarified also—but by the addition of the gentle egg white.) It has been “stabilized” by heating and by the addition of bacteria-killing chemicals. It is not a living thing.

The other wine lives and grows, and although in recent years technicians and winegrowers have come to understand a great deal more about the life of a wine and the different factors responsible for its development, it retains its mysterious autonomy, and even those old men who have nursed the vines and the wines of their fathers since childhood are constantly surprised by turns taken in a wine’s development, whether it be over a period of months as the new wine is refining in kegs or in the course of its life span in bottles. Although, in the large picture, a single wine develops along the same lines from one bottle to another, it rarely happens that two bottles of a very old wine—even though they be from the same keg, bottled at the same time, and laid side by side in the same cellar—present identically the same characteristics when opened one after the other.

The wine one drinks from one’s glass depends on a vast number of things that make it precisely what it is at that moment. The basic personality of a wine depends, for one thing, on the grape variety; certain varieties seem to be meant for the climate and soil of certain regions—their qualities are either lost or transformed when they are transplanted elsewhere. The age of the vines is also significant. They must be eight to ten years of age before producing a wine of maximum quality (grapes from younger vines are often harvested separately to make a lesser wine) and are usually replaced at the age of seventy or eighty years). Important, too, are the exposure (hillsides or inclines exposed to the south and east being considered the best), the care and pruning of the vines, the weather of the particular year, the care and rapidity with which the grapes are harvested and the weather at that time, the method of vinification and the cleanliness of the vessels in which it takes place (vinification is that part of a wine’s preparation related to the fermentation processes and succeeding purifications). That personality may or may not be developed to its fullest extent, depending on the age of the wine, the care it has received, the temperature at which it is served, the amount of time it has been allowed to breathe and expand between the opening of the bottle and the drinking of the wine, the shape of the glass in which it is drunk, the preparation it accompanies, the condition of one’s palate, and so on.

Not only is vinification an extremely complex process, but, methods vary from one region to another, and the following discussion must, necessarily, be very general in nature.