Gentlemen, we can rebuild this wine…

Wine technology consultant David Wollan would do well not to watch Mondovino. He’s no less passionate about wine than anyone it features, but he sees things differently to the traditional and arguably outdated perspective of the winemaker content to hand-make tiny amounts of wine from a small single vineyard, with only an electric light bulb as a concession to modernisation. However popular and satisfying the image of the Australian winemaking artisan, ‘clad in singlet and Stubbies, with a blue heeler at his side and his elbow in a ferment’, Wollan finds it elitist and impractical.

‘There is a notion that all wine should be made with minimal intervention from perfect grapes grown in perfect locations at uneconomically low yields, but if this was the case then there would only be about one percent of the wine there is around today, and it would only be bought by the wealthiest people’, he argues. ‘And even then people would have to become accustomed to finding that only one bottle in four or five was satisfactory.’

People, says Wollan, long for a simpler era when technology didn’t interfere in the process, before electricity and refrigeration, when grapes were all picked by hand and crushed by feet. But how realistic is this, and would the wine live up to present expectations of quality? He argues in the negative on both counts.

To begin with, let’s deal with some of the most popular misconceptions, of which the first is the most fundamentally incorrect: that wine can be made without intervention. Vinegar is the natural end product of the natural spoilage process of fermentation in which winemakers intervene to produce wine instead. Winemaking became interventionist the moment that sulphur dioxide was first added for this purpose. Since then, humankind has progressively introduced vine trellising, pruning and training techniques, barrels, pumps, cooling fermentations, running off juice, cold stabilisation, egg whites and countless other fining agents, plus blending between sites and varieties into the process, each of which today are widely considered to be an acceptable and non-interventionist! part of the romance of making wine.

David Wollan stoutly believes that the modern tools now available to winemakers are no more or less interventionist than these. ‘Like pregnancy, you’re either intervening or your not, and you can’t be partially pregnant’ he says.

The second popular misconception today is that modern ‘industrial’ food is poisoning us. Surely, if this was the case, we would be living shorter, not longer lives. Wollan highlights the ‘pathological fear of new technology’, with wine and food. Without doubting the dangers of the fast food phenomenon highlighted in the book ‘Fast Food Nation’ and ‘Supersize Me’, this fear extends well beyond the scope of fast food. The wine industry has promoted the small-scale artisan approach of marketing its product at the expense of communicating the benefits of modern large-scale production and technology. Huge volume brands are still presented to the public using images of winemakers quietly going about their work in dimly lit cellars of small, new oak casks. In truth, the nearest that most such wines ever get to such a cellar is when a bottle is taken in by mistake, or else for a photo shoot. Winemakers should talk up their technological capability, not try to pretend it doesn’t exist behind a veneer of stuffy, outdated imagery and deception.

How does this technology benefit the day-to-day wine drinker? By providing, at a minuscule cost relative to what the same wine would cost in its absence, a flavoursome, reliable, stable and very drinkable and enjoyable wine. Sure, Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay is not Giaconda, but neither is it sold at anywhere near the same price.

David Wollan puts the case that: ‘Good quality, safe and consistently reliable beverage wine should be widely available and not to just a handful of wealthy enthusiasts. We should be thankful for the technology that enables this. Not many consumers are aware that they should be grateful to technology for the lower levels of preservative in modern wines compared to the old-fashioned ‘artisan’ styles they dream about. Today we need to add less stuff that isn’t wine or doesn’t come from grapes.’

Winemakers, says Wollan, need to decide what they’re about – making wine strictly from grapes made from a particular vineyard from certain procedures – possibly organic or biodynamic – and according to certain techniques. ‘If that means that in one particular year the wine is thin and green, or over-ripe and alcoholic the next, so be it. I have a problem with the winemakers who use the various technical manipulations now available but still claim to be holier than thou, pretending to the public that they’re clearly something they’re not’, he says.

‘If you deconstruct a wine, do some sort of a treatment and then recombine it in order not to put some extraneous stuff into the wine, that is completely consistent with the best principles of natural winemaking. Is it any less natural than adding sulphur? Or adding oak from barrels?’

The Winemaker’s New Tools



Today, more than ever, a suite of high-tech options exists at the fingertips of modern winemakers to alter, adapt or fine-tune their wines. Some of the public might be familiar with terms like reverse osmosis, micro-oxygenation and nanofiltration, each of which are still regarded with varying levels of scepticism and enthusiasm by different winemakers. Put bluntly, a modern winemaker can completely deconstruct and rebuild a wine. Some deficiencies in vineyard management can now be corrected in the winery, and certain winemaking faults eliminated or reduced below threshold levels. None of these techniques involve applying additives, or in any way affecting wine labeling standards or regional identification. Here’s a brief explanation of the major new tools in the winemaker’s kitbag.

Freeze concentration



Uses:

Removes water from grape juice and wine, concentrating flavour, sugar, alcohol and acid.

Micro-oxygenation



Uses:

Constructs a firmer, more durable and better-integrated tannin structure
Enhances colour, mouthfeel and balance
Reduces green and herby characters
Removes bound sulphide and other reductive characters

The popular misconception is that this technique that dispenses oxygen to wine in a controlled and measurable way is simply used to bring cheap commercial red wines onto the market sooner. Its greatest benefit is however delivered at the upper end of the quality spectrum.

Spinning cone distillation



Uses:

Concentration of grape juice
Alcohol reduction
Removal of SO2 from grape juice
Flavour recovery from marc and lees

When used for alcohol adjustment, the wine makes two passes through the machine, firstly to remove the delicate flavours, secondly to remove the alcohol. The flavours and the de-alcoholised wine are then recombined with the bulk of the wine.

Membrane separation techniques



Reverse osmosis
Nanofiltration
Ultrafiltration
Evaporative perstraction
Electrodialysis

Uses:

Flavour concentration
Alcohol adjustment
Volatile acidity removal
Taint treatment
Tannin fractionation
Tartrate stabilization

These techniques utilise the fact that different membrane types pass various wine components differentially. Ultimately, they can surgically remove individual constituents of wine with minimal change to the rest of its composition, which may in effect enhance the perception of more desirable flavours. They add nothing to the wine at all, and simply remove targeted molecules, retaining other constituents such as sugars, ions, esters flavours, anthocyanins colours and other phenolics tannins.

Reverse osmosis was initially introduced to Australia around 20 years ago, as a means of concentrating grape must, which might have been diluted through significant rainfall prior to harvest or through excessive irrigation. By removing excess water, it concentrates everything that remains including sugars, acids and flavours. The traditional French alternative of chapitalisation simply adds sugar alone to the must, which only ultimately affects the alcohol level and not the flavour intensity of the finished wine. Naturally, with sugar levels that are already excessive a common feature of the 2005 harvest, reverse osmosis could exacerbate another problem.

The next major advance was to use these techniques to remove unwanted volatile acidity acetic acid and ethyl acetate, leaving the rest of the wine essentially unchanged. Today, through advances made by David Wollan’s Wine Network Australia, winemakers can now fractionate wines into different components. The component that contains the undesirable feature, which could be anything from excessive alcohol, to smoke taint or brettanomyces taint, can then be treated before it is then recombined with the rest of the wine.

In 2003 a large number of Australian and Canadian wineries were adversely affected by bush fire smoke, which can leave a powerful and dominant used ashtray-like character on nose and palate. David Wollan’s team devised a technique using their reverse osmosis and nanofiltration equipment to remove the major offending compounds, guaiacol and 4-methylguaiacol. Having tasted a large number of ‘before’ and ‘after’ treatments, I can say with some conviction that while none of the ‘afters’ approached top-shelf standard, most were indeed drinkable and enjoyable wines that at least would provide some economic return and cash flow for their makers. A traditional ‘non-interventionist’ approach would have seen these wines either tipped down the drain or sold with their deficiencies on full display.

Wollan then took the educated punt that he could also remove 4-ethylphenol and 4-ethylguaiacol, the major off-flavours produced by brettanomyces spoilage yeast, by tinkering with the same equipment. In one instance, Wollan’s machine reduced the 4EP level in a wine from 722 Please login to post comment