Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [29]
When it comes to wine, the usual tendency is to link quality to price. But there is a trap here into which many buyers fall: The belief that price and quality are neatly proportional, as in the twenty-dollar bottle is twice as good as the ten-dollar one. You certainly have a right to expect better quality for a higher price, but supply and demand, marketing hype, and brand recognition also figure into pricing. It is frequently true that you can pay more and get better wine, but it is not the case that you must pay a lot for good wine. Let’s look at quality in wine, both how it is achieved and how it tastes.
What makes quality wine? Insert “food,” “shoes,” or any other product in place of “wine,” and the answer to this question is basically the same. Quality comes from two things: excellent raw materials (the “garbage in, garbage out” principle), and skilled handling of those raw materials to maximize their potential.
Great Wine Is Made in the Vineyard
In the case of wine grapes as the raw material, a lot of factors influence the quality level. Vineyard location, soil, and topography make a quality difference since grapes are like any plant. Consider your garden tomatoes. Some locations work better than others, depending on the type of soil, the drainage, sun and shade patterns, and the amount and timing of watering. The same factors affect the quality of grapevines’ output.
Here are some interesting points to note about wine growing:
Bad soils make good wines. What is unusual about vines in this context is the type of soil needed for best results. While most farmers look for fertile ground, wine grape growers know that poor soils low in organic content make the best wines. The reason is that fertile soils promote vigorous growth, causing the vine to feed its energy to the green parts of the plant—the leaves and shoots—rather than to ripening the fruit.
Example: In France’s famous Burgundy region, the hillsides, where soils are rocky and poor due to erosion, are home to the best-quality vineyards. Vine plots on the flat land, where the soil is richer, produce more ordinary wines that typically sell at a fraction of the price of the hillside-grown wines.
Vines should work for their water. For most vegetables and fruits, an ample water supply is crucial to how the garden grows. Grape vines need plenty of water, too, but how and when they get it has a major impact on wine quality. As grape growers say, vines should struggle for their water, and they don’t like “wet feet.” The struggle results in a healthier plant, and more flavorful grapes, by encouraging the vine to devote its energy to root and grape growth, the good stuff, rather than excess leaves. “Wet feet” refers to roots planted in soils that hold moisture. Since vines are prone to rot in damp conditions, well-drained soils suit them better. That is why great vineyards are often those engineered for good drainage—sloped, or rocky, or both. Nature can do the engineering, or technology. In preparing a new vineyard wineries may use earth movers to engineer vineyard slopes and drainage where they didn’t previously exist.
Example: Chile’s vineyards are known for their access to virtually unlimited irrigation water—the melting snow runoff from the nearby Andes Mountains. Historically, this allowed high production quantities but limited Chile’s quality potential. A new wave of Chilean wineries is improving quality by avoiding overirrigation. The top-quality Casa Lapostolle winery uses “dry farming”—no irrigation at all.
Growing season weather is critical to quality. This answers the question, What makes a “good year” or a “good vintage”? The amount and timing of sun, rain, wind, and so on directly affects the flavor quality of the grapes, and thus the wine. Some years are better than others—just as with your tomatoes.
Viticultural methods make a major quality difference. Many winemakers say “Great wine is made in the vineyard.” They focus on the term I used above, “wine growing,” rather than “winemaking.” This philosophy emphasizes tasks done