The Janitor Who Made Wine

With any luck, and a touch of brevity, this post will complete my summary of influences, thoughts, and experiences that drew me into the world of wine and its creation. We are involved in a lot of wine making activities today, and I'd like to start sharing the current journey through this blog very soon. That said, I can't believe how much time has elapsed since my last post! My daughter learned how to crawl last week, and my boss decided to send me away on a business trip three weeks before my scheduled work return from a parental leave. Time marches on...

I was under the impression that making the wine was a romantic affair, laden in intrigue and mystic; a magical experience whereby the grapes were transmogrified from the vineyard to the bottle. Not quite. If there's one thing that I learned about wine, during my first year with the in-laws, was that its creation is intimately associated with cleaning. There's a janitorial aspect to this work that can seem endless at times.

In the in-laws' cellar, a fantastic quantity of wine had accumulated over 20 years of effort. Before I contributed in any remotely useful way, it was necessary to spend numerous evenings, usually following supper, in the cellar admiring pin-ups of past swimsuit models and tasting from my father in-law's rather vast library of wine. I didn't even know about the second cellar, yet.

Finally, in late winter, the call came: could I come over on the weekend to help with the transfer (racking) of last year's vintage. I'd earned my wings! To my considerable surprise, we spent the morning in the previously-secret, second wine cellar. Located in another part of the house, this little cave hovered around 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit) and contained barrel after barrel of wine, stacked nearly to the ceiling. There was a sense of tranquility akin to the tombs of the Pharaohs, and one could not escape the awe of so many vintages sleeping peacefully alongside each other.

It turns out that peacefulness and patience were two key attributes (second of course to the quality of the grapes) that contributed to the overall brilliance of his wine. Have a look some day at what's actually in a kit wine (your comprehension will be aided vastly with a M.Sc. in chemistry). Or, if you can squirrel it out of your home winemaker friend, who uses fresh grapes, ask what additives go into his wine. Would you like a refreshing sip of potassium sorbate, glycerol, sorbitol, gum arabic, citric or malic acid? You could chase that with pectic enzyme, sodium bentonite, egg whites (yes, indeed!), gelatin, or even sulphuric acid! Okay, some of these compounds do find a role in quality wine making, but this was decidedly not my father-in-law's approach.

Grapes (always the grapes), time, patience, and sulphur dioxide were the champions of his day.

Sulphur dioxide (SO2) may sound noxious and as though it belongs in a small smelter town with a hard-living population of non-wine drinkers (it is actually pretty nasty stuff), but it's been used in wine making since antiquity. The ancients had long known that burning sulphur released fumes (mainly SO2) that were very effective in killing rats and insects, hence the term fumigation, and accordingly helpful in de-infesting ships, houses, food and wine vessels. Although S02's role in wine preservation wasn't fully understood before the advent of modern chemistry and biology, those Mediterranean imperialists soon recognised that wine containers (amphorae and later barrels) smoked with sulphur kept their product fresh for extended periods of time - a practise still happily employed in nearly every wine available today. S02 is an effective antioxidant that is lethal to many microbes; perhaps accounting for its natural presence in yeast cells during fermentation and even within the human body. S02 is an essential, time honoured, and natural means to produce any wine of quality.

We were racking the fall vintage that winter day. Racking is used to clarify wine and is a simple process whereby wine is transferred from one container to the next, leaving behind any solids (dead yeast, proteins, assorted muck) that have fallen to the bottom of the container.

Good red wine achieves clarity and brilliance strictly through aging and racking. In Bordeaux, for instance, it is common to age reds for at least eighteen months, racking every three to six months, before bottling. You can use some of the additives I've mentioned above to accelerate this process, i.e., the six-week wine kit, but at some cost to the quality and composition of the final product... My father-in-law usually aged his wine for at least three years and had more than a few barrels dating back to the 90's.

Racking day was a study in contrasts.

Opening the barrel imbued the air with a deep, earthy, and still fruity sense of the grape. Using a very slow, but gentle, diaphragm pump to move the wine to its new barrel gave ample time to consider the wine and hear the many stories about vineyards, labour, sunshine, and family. Tasting from a short water glass, while standing in the cold cramped cellar, brought alive the history of wine and all the passion that went into its making.



Then it was time to choke (literally) while cleaning pumps, hoses, empty barrels, and anything else that had come into contact with the wine. Sanitation is an absolute requirement for any wine making operation, and the key ingredient is none other than S02. Fortunately, S02 comes in more convenient forms today, and we didn't need to build a call-the-fire-department sulphur pyre, but our oldschool breathe and gasp technique ensured long bouts of coughing for me and heart palpitations for my in-law. My first real contribution to family wine making was the purchase of two respirators.

Today, in my own operations, any wine procedure begins with cleaning and ends with cleaning. There is a certain irony in this aspect of wine making that only my mother could truly appreciate.

On a totally unrelated note, if you're interest caters to home renovation, check out our Ottawa friends' ongoing project.

The Passion

At some ill defined point in my growing history of empty bottles, I started to amuse myself with the notion that I too could personally craft a fine wine. I had no idea how, no means to do so, and few clues on where one would begin. Accordingly, I kept my titillation in check. Also, I'd never tasted a "home-made" wine that didn't taste, well, home made. When I did venture forth and tenderly express my secret desire to a girlfriend of southern european extraction (who's father made wine at home), the returning laughter did not inspire confidence or longevity.

I met my wife shortly thereafter. Our attraction was based on many things, none of which related at all to wine, but that would soon change when I met her father.

Those initial meet-the-parents moments are fraught with angst (for me), the need to make a good impression, and the greater need to quickly have a good drink or two and hopefully relax. I already knew that my future in-law was a wine maker. What I didn't know was what to expect in the glass that day. Typical home made wine itwas not! Instead of the fizzy, often sweet, sometimes vinegar fiasco I was expecting, the wine poured that day was rich, full of fruit, balanced, and extremely enjoyable.

Over the next few months, over many glasses of wine, I started to learn the real story of a journey through land, agriculture, determination, and finally wine. It was poetry, the stuff of our conversations, and the view my father in-law had when it came to growing vinifera grapes, crafting wine, and enjoying that drink with "thousands of flowers" among family and friends. His was no pedestrian effort to vinify grape juice, it was passion.

In our little corner of the world, the first viticulturists to successfully grow european grape varietals were mostly immigrants, and my father in-law, coming from southern Europe, was one of the first to raise merlot vines in his vineyard. Like the best winegrowers anywhere in the world, he intimately understood that it all begins in the vineyard and that the quality of the wine is a direct reflection of the quality of the grape. Even the very best vigneron is nearly helpless when facing a bad harvest. Good grapes, however, generally make good wine and without too much intervention from the wine maker.

We had many conversations about where you could and shouldn't grow grapes; where grapes might grow but not fully ripen; how frost could steal your crop one year and not the next; soil types, parasites; and, how proper rootstock adapted a plant to produce best in local conditions. We talked about trellising, pruning, fertilising, mildew, mold, and nearly every detail of good viticulture. It was all about the grape and I hadn't even seen his wine cellar yet.