by Paul B. » Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:07 am
I'm sure that many wine lovers have experienced this before. You sample wines at some small country winery and sometimes the wines simply do not taste clean; they may look alright and be free of other common flaws like volatile acidity or turbidity, yet they may have a generally "dirty", contaminated taste that hints at imperfect cleanliness somewhere during processing. I've encountered such wines at small wineries but also when trying some people's homemade wines - some of which are really dirty and I can't imagine how they can be enjoyable.
What has interested me for some time now is how commercial wineries actually manage to turn out clean wines when dealing with large quantities. Strict sanitation of the equipment is a no-brainer, but given that grapes aren't hosed down prior to harvest and all manner of debris can and does make it into the hopper prior to crush, why do the resulting wines that you buy commercially generally taste clean and free of that nasty dirtiness that can affect low-tech wines? Is it filtration that somehow removes off-flavours that might come from dust, bird poop and whatever else? A truly perplexing question.
On the flipside, if you are making small quantities of homemade wine and observe strict sanitation and hand-harvesting and separation of grapes from stems and other debris (and use neutral fermentation/storage vessels like glass), you can be generally sure that your wine will be okay. Even though I do this personally, at times I swear I can taste a bit of the dust that coated the grapeskins before I crushed them - and no, I don't wash the grapes beforehand nor do I filter my wines afterwards.
It all boils down to how wineries manage to produce clean wines when dealing with such large quantities where there are more opportunities for contamination along the way...
http://hybridwines.blogspot.ca