Читать книгу The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season - Richard Olney - Страница 12

All the grape varieties used for making fine red wines are whitefleshed and give a transparent juice. The coloring matter comes from the skins. (Certain grape varieties known as teinturiers are red-fleshed and are used to strengthen the color of inferior wines.) The grapes, once picked, are usually passed through a machine that crushes them at the same time that it separates them from the stems. In the past, the stems were left and the grapes were crushed by treading them with one’s bare feet. This is still done on certain small properties, and if economically practicable would still, no doubt, be the best method, for in this way the seeds do not risk being crushed and lending their bitterness to the wine. The removal of the stems is useful in producing wines that are more supple (the tannin contained in the stems does not go into it), and slightly higher in alcoholic content and color, since the water from the stems is eliminated. The crushed grapes are then put into enormous vats, which may be either open or closed; these are traditionally wooden, but today very often of glass-lined cement or stainless steel, which are much easier to clean and maintain. In these vats the juice and the pulp ferment together, the color is transferred to the juice because of the molecular transformation in the pulp, and the sugar is transformed into alcohol. In a normal year– neither too hot nor too cold—the fermentation begins easily and the temperature in the vats does not rise too high (if it goes beyond approximately 95° F., the bacteria are paralyzed and the fermentation is arrested before all the sugar has been transformed into alcohol). In cold years it is often necessary to heat a certain quantity of crushed grapes (pied de cuve), which, when in full fermentation, is then added to the vat in order to launch the bacteria rendered sluggish by the cold. In hot years the fermentation is often too active. The must (grape juice) is aerated and special cooling apparatuses installed in the vats are put into operation to prevent the temperature from rising beyond 85° F. (In the past, all that could be done was to throw in a few blocks of ice—far from the ideal solution.) Normally, the alcoholic fermentation is terminated after five or six days, the wine is left to cool in the vat, then drawn off and put into barrels. In the earlier part of this century, it was standard practice to leave the wine and pulp together in the vat for as long as three weeks to a month, producing a wine richer in tannin. Today, the average length of time is more likely to be from five to ten days. The pulp remaining in the vat is then pressed and the resulting liquid (vin de presse) is, in most instances, mixed with the wine that has been drawn off, but sometimes it is kept apart to make an inferior wine. Certain great wines may gain by not receiving the addition of the pressed wine, but most wines depend on this addition to give them more body. Red wines remain in kegs for from six months (Beaujolais, for instance) to three years (certain of the great Bordeaux), one and one-half or two years representing the average. During this period the kegs must be regularly refilled to compensate for evaporation and protect the wine from contact with air, the wine must be regularly drawn from one keg to another (soutirage) to separate the clear wine from the deposits at the bottom of the keg, and most wines are clarified just before the last soutirage or two by the addition of egg white or another albuminous substance.

A secondary fermentation—once thought to have been the tail end of the alcoholic fermentation, thrust back into action by the presence in the air of the pollen from the grape flowers in the spring following the harvest—has in recent years been identified as a completely separate process, which, however, rarely takes place until the alcoholic fermentation is finished, and because of the cold winter months, without the interference of the technician, waits until spring to go into action. It is known as the “malo-lactic” fermentation and produces a de-acidification essential to the quality of the wine. Nowadays, vinification techniques often permit the rapid termination of the malolactic fermentation immediately after the alcoholic fermentation (by drawing the still warm wine from the vat directly into another vat and keeping the vinification cellar—chais—heated, for instance).