Vintaging – the culmination of year's work
Ian Hickinbotham
Noble Rot on Riesling grapes, Geelong, Victoria [©Ian Hickinbotham]
For oenologists, vintage is the culmination of the year’s work. Putting it another way, if you don’t do the vintage, meaning – being prepared to work up to 20 hours a day – you might as well not be there the rest of the year.
I began ‘vintaging’ as a ‘Baumé Boy’. This meant starting at 7:00am to test the degree of sweetness remaining in the fermenting juice bubbling happily in the open top fermenting tanks. A copper cylinder closed with a close-fitting slotted lid affixed to a stick was lowered into the mass and some of the fermenting juice flowed in through the lid.
Then I floated a special hydrometer in the liquid, read the mark at the meniscus and recorded the reading and the temperature. The hydrometer scale was graduated in degrees of Baumé, the name being that of a Frenchman: though intended for measuring density of salt solutions, it had become entrenched as the measure of sugar content in juice or fermenting juice, because, accidentally, every degree Baumé is equivalent to the eventual percentage of alcohol by volume. Thus, a 12 degree Baumé juice could be expected to result in a 12 percent alcohol (ABV) wine - provided all of the natural grape sugar was fermented.
Fermentation in those days was quite vigorous as we had no refrigeration to cool them: the simple conversion of the grape sugar into alcohol and gas by yeasts, during the night was always considerable. One morning, the landlady's dog that always accompanied me, collapsed while I was doing my rounds. I knew enough about winemaking to realise that, carbon dioxide gas, the gas of fermentation (and Champagne) being heavier than air, had settled in the corridor overnight, so the dog, at his height, lacked air to breathe, so I carried it outside where it quickly recovered.
The sweetness of each tank of fermenting juice was quickly examined by the chief oenologist who decided which of them would be 'racked' into a storage tank and fortified by the cellar hands who arrived for work at 8:00am. (Racking in this context meant simply draining the fermenting juice away from its grape skins.) It was a time when Australia made virtually only sweet fortified wines, Ports and Sherries as they were then known (but it only took 50 years to change to making 90 percent table wine to meet the changed taste of Australians).
To finish with a Port or Sweet Sherry of about three degrees Baumé, the fermenting juice had to be fortified when about six degrees of sugar remained. In other words, the fermentation had to be 'caught' (not just stopped) by the sudden addition of the alcohol which effectively killed the active yeasts busily converting grape sugar into alcohol. Without the alcohol addition, juice inevitably ferments to dry wine, which we generally define as table wine. (Strictly speaking, there always remains some 0.2 percent of sugar, but it is non-fermentable types that do not really subscribe to the final taste of the wine.)
The reason the final wine is only about half the sugar Baumé reading than the fermenting juice at the time of fortification is not just due to the increase in volume. The alcohol has a much lower density that the fermenting juice and therefore, so does the mixture, which partially explains the 'disappearance' of the three degrees Baumé. In fact, if the alcohol is added gently, it will float on the surface of the fermenting juice.
'Catching' the fermenting juice when about six degrees of sweetness remained was impossible much of the vintage time: 'middle of the night' was a common vintage phrase. So, in practice, some tanks were fortified when there was less than the six degrees Baumé and they had to be countered by fortifying other tanks above that degree, then the new wines would be blended together.
Ian Hickinbotham, one of the most innovative and influential oenologists in Australia over his 50 year career, is the author of Australian Plonky (see related review below).
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