A Different Kind of Bug

People often stop me on the street and say, “What do winemakers talk about in late November?”  Well, probably the number-one question we ask of each other in this profession is “So, d’ya getcher deer?”

Just kidding. It’s “How are your MLs doing?”

MLs in this case are winemaker shorthand for malolactic fermentations. You may recall seeing a picture of Tricia in an earlier post, initiating the process from on high with little cups of freeze-dried bacteria. That was a few weeks ago: by now, our MLs are either well underway or wrapped up entirely.

What’s the point of this procedure? A guaranteed modest reduction in the acidity of the wine, associated with the conversion of malic acid to lactic, is rarely a bad thing in our cool climate. But we also expect an increase in aroma and flavor complexity.

Not all wines need to undergo this extra microbial treatment, but we normally ask it of our reds and our barrel-fermented Chardonnay. In Chards, the added complexity often presents as a mild butter or butterscotch character (a little goes a long way), whereas in reds the change is harder to describe but definitely a good thing. We can transform Pinot noir, for instance, from a simple cherry- and berry-flavored concoction into one that’s more reminiscent of earth, cola and spices with the aid of bacteria, especially if ML happens in conjunction with barrel maturation.

The organism we recruit to do the work has the scientific name oenococcus oeni, with both the oe- prefixes pronounced like ee-. Our friend Chris Stamp at Lakewood Vineyards, who has a decidedly un-eunuch-like devotion to his craft, went ahead and renamed it weenie coccus weenie, despite the fact that bacteria don’t actually have undersized sexual organs, and in fact possess none at all. (To give you an even clearer idea of what’s on Chris’s mind much of the time, he’s still upset that he didn’t trademark the name ‘Viagra’ for a proprietary blend of Vignoles and Niagara, years ago.)

Malolactic bacteria are dwarfed by yeast cells, though neither is visible to the naked eye. It takes a serious microscope to get a look at oenococci. They’re fussier and more fickle too, somewhat like the stereotype of a Russian mail-order bride: apt to sulk if they don’t get the things they want and deserve. Thus we keep the cellar at a balmy 70 degrees F, and play soothing music rather than the more jarring stuff, and perhaps ply them with baubles.

Most wineries with modest budgets use a process called paper chromatography to monitor the progress of this transformation. It’s a fun though somewhat laborious technique involving a smelly solvent, some tiny glass tubes called micropipettes, and a few run-of-the-mill items like pickle jars, staplers, blow dryers and clothes pegs. Here are a few visuals:

Preparing to Evaluate Our MLs

Ten barrel samples of wine in the yogurt cups are
carefully transferred to the spots on the paper.

Chromatography Underway

The strong smelling solution (hence the lid) is drawn upwards.

Not a Standard X-Ray

Ten columns of spots, left to right.  Individual columns represent
a different wine sample, in various stages of ML.  Samples 2, 8, 9, and 10
aren't finished yet, as indicated bya spot midway up: malic acid.

Another quick and easy way to find out if ML is progressing in a barrel is to press your ear tightly to the bunghole. A telltale crackling sound indicates the evolution of carbon dioxide gas: either alcoholic fermentation is still finishing up (unlikely in a wine this late in the year) or the lactic acid bacteria are having at it. No way is this a sensitive enough diagnostic by itself – it’s the wine equivalent of gauging wind speed by the flapping of a flag in the breeze. It simply tells us if something is happening or not happening.

Moreover, the ear-to-the bunghole technique carries the risk of a very specific pseudo-malady. Without being consciously aware of it, we often ‘apply’ a bruise-like ring of red wine to the outer ear when we listen in on a barrel. It makes us look either like we have an exotic disease, or like our head area has been worked over by bullies. ‘Red Ear’ is a minor badge of honor around the winery, but it’s important to wash it off before emerging into the outside world, or risk getting some odd looks if we stop in at the supermarket on the way home. Then again, it might mean that we get the Express Lane all to ourselves.

Barrel Music

Sounds like a tired pastiche of every sea shell you've ever
listened to; this barrel needs to up its artistic game to be as
worthy of critical attention, radio play, and trite metaphors.

Red Ear

Pseudo-malady or awesome pirate name?  You decide!

By: Peter Bell, Winemaker


Music of the Day:

• Kate Bush - Aerial; "Sunset":

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The Barrel: Wine Container Ne Plus Ultra

Barrels are such an integral part of winemaking that it’s hard to visit a winery anywhere and not see at least a few of these beautiful oaken containers on display. In fact, the standard, cliché photo of a winemaker shows him or her either posed in front of a stack of barrels or taking a sample of wine out of one for evaluation.

The barrel as we know it is a remarkably old invention, having been developed by the Celts about 700 years ago. Yes! In addition to having brought us Enya, Lucky Charms and the phrase “Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!”, the Celts, who populated a great swath of Europe in their heyday, also developed the technology to bend staves of wood and hold them tight with iron hoops. I guess they had to have some way of keeping the vermin out of their breakfast cereal.

Primarily a transport container in its original iteration, the barrel came to be associated with directly improving wine quality only much more recently. Nowadays it’s almost obligatory to put fine red wines in barrels for a year or so, and many of the finest Chardonnays camp out there too (Riesling, Nein danke).

As it happens, Chardonnay likes to be introduced to oak well before it is actually a finished wine, via a process called barrel fermentation. Now commonplace, this practice was new and cutting-edge to New World winemakers about 30 years ago, though in reality it had been practiced by Burgundian winemakers for eons (add your own definition of an eon here).

The story goes that either a Californian or an Australian practitioner went to Burgundy and asked, “Why do you ferment your Chardonnay in barrels?” The answer, no doubt accompanied by a Gallic shrug, was along the lines of  “Because that’s the only container I have.”

The other story, this one actually verifiable, is that Fox Run owner Scott Osborn is here in the Finger Lakes because of barrel fermented Chardonnay. He had spent some time immersed in the California wine industry in the 1980s, but decided to set up shop locally after tasting an early example from the pioneers of that style here, Wagner Vineyards.

Putting Chardonnay juice in barrels, and then commencing to look after what has just become a large number of individual fermentations rather than just one, certainly ramps up the work load during vintage. But the returns in terms of wine quality are enormous. Thanks to our understanding of microbiology and biochemistry, we now know that yeast cell enzymes act in concert with the soluble components of oak to produce aroma compounds that would otherwise not make their way into the wine.

Thus a barrel-fermented Chardonnay, even one from new oak, can show as not especially oaky. The integration of oak into the fruit can be so subtle that we even ferment that most delicate of wine styles, our Blanc de Blancs sparkling wine, in oak, albeit oak that was “pre-owned” by several previous vintages of Chardonnay. By contrast, a Chardonnay introduced to a new barrel after fermenting to dryness would smell more like a lumberyard than a wine. (Those of us who tasted the early, clumsy examples of oak-aged California Chard in the late 1970s remember that very sensation. Eeew.)

Our barrel-fermented Chardonnay, destined for the bottling we designate Reserve, is just coasting to dryness as I write this. Next step: coaxing all 33 barrels through malolactic fermentation. More on that, including the winemaker-specific pseudo-malady known as Red Ear, in a future post.

-By Peter Bell, Winemaker

Music of the Day:

• Patrick Hadley; Jazz Improvisation on a 5 Octave Array Mbira (Youtube Only):

Support Artists, buy the music you like!