In-Store Tasting 4/22

Stop by on Thursday to taste four favorite staff picks. The Chardonnay is a great value, with its melon and pineapple tones. The Sauvignon Blanc is refreshing, the perfect sipper for warm nights. The Zinfandel is a real gem. It is spicy, brimming with berry flavors, perfect for barbequed fare. The Cabernet Sauvignon is stellar, offering cassis, dark chocolate with a dollop of vanilla.

April 22nd, 2010
Peak Beverage Group Wines
White Tail Chardonnay $8.99
Delorimier Sauvignon Blanc $13.99
Berghold Foot Stomp Zinfandel $20.99
Berghold Cabernet Sauvignon $20.99

Stop by on THURSDAY to sample each from 4:30pm to 7:00pm. Receive a 15% off discount, for any wine being poured as an in-store sample, during the tasting hours.

Read about Enology, how wine is made.

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Enology :: How wine is made

Do you scratch your head when the winemaker starts taking about skin contact, barriques, or lees stirring? Just like any industry, the wine business has its own lingo. Being able to appreciate the art requires you to have a grasp on the vocabulary.
      The sooner a ripe grape is crushed the better. Dom Perignon, the innovative monk who propelled Champagne into the limelight, crushed his grapes in the vineyard as they were being picked. The word crush implies broken grape berry skins, but many winemakers have the knack of crushing the grapes so most of the skins are left in tact. Crush is a verb, but in the wine industry it is also a noun referring to a time during harvest.
      Some producers prefer to use the weight of the grapes to release the juice. This is called free run and is considered the best juice. After collecting the free run juice, a producer can elect to press the grapes to collect the remaining juice. Pressing gently squeezes the grapes. A producer can use free run, a press, or both. They can also blend the juices extracted together, or ferment them separately.
      This is where red, rose, and white differ. Red and rose wines are made with grapes with red or purple skins. For red wine, the juice rests on the skins for up to a week. In order to impart enough color to the juice, producers punch down the cap of skins that float to the top of the vat several times a day. Some producers do this by hand. Others use a pump over method, which pulls the juice from the bottom and pours it over the cap. Extracting color and flavor from the skins is also called maceration.
      Rose rest on the skins for a small amount of time. Removing a portion of the juice after a day or so will improve the concentration of the remaining red wine. The juice removed from the maceration process will be fermented and sold as rose.
      White wine grapes are green, pink, or gold in color. Their skins are removed immediately when crushed. Even though white grapes have less tannin than red grapes, removing the skins early in the fermentation preserves a white wine's smooth character. There is no need to punch down the skins or macerate white wine for several days.
      The yeast is added shortly after the grapes are crushed. The grape sugar is continuously measured as the fermentation takes place. As the yeast eats the grape sugar, the alcohol rises and the sugar declines. As fermentation slows the wine is moved to a container for aging, usually a barrel (barrique), stainless steel tank, or glass lined concrete vat.
      The wine can be transferred to or from barrels or vats and fined or filtered before going to the bottle as it ages. Fining is a process where solids, like egg whites, are added to the wine to draw particulates to the bottom. Filtering is where the wine is drawn through a filter. There is a trend moving away from fining and filtering.
      A white wine producer can elect to stir the lees, a process that imparts a creamy flavor. Lees are sediment consisting of dead yeast cells, like the sediment on the bottom of a homemade beer. Stirring the lees off the bottom of the tank will add yeasty, cream-like, floral, and sometimes nutty flavors.
      Of course there is a technical side to this process that would fill a text book or thirty. For those of us who like to enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor, a little bit of winemaker jargon is just enough.

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