I am Michael Zitzlaff, Chief wine maker at Crushpad and welcome to the Winemaker’s Minute. The first of—hopefully many wine makers’ minutes that you can save.
One of the key things that when we sit down and told you about your wine plan which is really what we would like function—focus on today is the very first section that wine plan comes under the wine style section. As winemakers, when we sit down, explain and go through you with the wine plan, the operations, and the various parts of it. What we are trying to do to find out in wine style, is to actually work out what is in your head and what style of wine do you really want to make.
Things like style, structure, link, palate weight, the depth of fruit and the depth of flavor about white wines and red wines and also particularly with reds, carbonized and infidelity, amount of tannin that you have in that wine. That ultimately provides you with padded links, and extract. Some of the general style sections that we cover and we will go through you in quite detail, is the overall style of your wine, feminine and elegance? maybe I should not call it feminine. Oh what the heck. Let’s call it elegance, soft but quite aromatic or is it more masculine and bold, a little bit more like Popeye or after you eat spinach or do your really want to make a wine that has got lots of blocky tannin, chunky, chewy, something that really give you a headache in the morning. That is a style.
You have two extremes of style, soft and elegance. All full bodied and blocky. That is what we will discuss with you all through Crushnet. You can actually set the slide to yourself. Looking at other things, or your portability, do you want the wine to be drunk young or to be or do you want it to be drunk, 15, 20 years at your daughter’s or son’s 21st birthday party. There are the other things you can think about. Do you want the wine to be consumed with food or by itself? That also affects the tannin and the palate weight, the acidity particularly of the wine.
Some of the attributes, the key attributes that we focus on, oak, whether you want, very little oak support of the wine so that the wine is very fruit driven. Or do you want a wine that is really firm and full bodied and a lot of oak in the bank which gives you a much longer palate. That is really important decision and you really need to think about that when you are going through your wine style section.
The color. Is color important to you? Do you want it to be very deep and dark, dense, black, inky or is color secondary importance to you as long as it is red, as long as it got some depth and some hue to it that it shows that it is young then you will be satisfied. These are the things, aromatics, do you want it to be explosive, does it have to jump out of the glass and just absolutely assault your olfactory senses. Or do you want it to be soft and restrained, maybe balance with a little bit of oak so that it creates a wine that is a little bit more complex but it does not have to be that aromatic. It is not that important to you.
The other option is the flavor. The ripeness with a little bit of green tannin is not such a problem particularly with some of that surrounds that we make with clusters, and will it get to that particular data that has better later or are you are looking for a very soft supple tannin or a tannin that is really full and rich and mouth dry. One that absolutely practice your mouth and as I said, you will have a very bad headache in the morning. So all this individual factors come together to give you the flavors and the styles of the wine you are trying to make. You can consider some of the individual components as we go through this next at few wine makers’ minutes, hopefully you will be able to draw that picture of exactly what is the wine that you decline or want to make.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services