Making Wine: Part 1

One great aspect of studying oenology (winemaking) at Adelaide University is getting to make your own wine! Postgrads get to make 2 batches: an "S" component...not sure what the S stands for but I presume supplementary... and a wine for the Winemaking at Vintage (WM@V) course.

The Grenache for WM@V is the topic of this post...what an amazing variety it is! Having tasted/drunk/been drunk on very little Grenache before arriving in Aus I have really enjoyed getting to know it better...South Australia is blessed with "heaps" (a good Aussie term) of old vine Grenache. Why do you want old vines? Well Grenache is a variety that is well endowed/heavy bearing/isnt shy to put out. As a result in its youth (first 15 years or so) Grenache is very vigorous (grows quickly and strong) and as I eluded to before gives you huge crops of large bunches. Why is that bad...high yeilds dont always = good quality....circle of life and we are back to why old vines are good...they have lower yields, the vines are in better balance, less vigorous and the wine is much more concentrated flavour and colour wise. SOOO, the wine is better. Sho, that took a while.

The Good Dr. Chertkoff with our Grenache

But moving on, Grenache is meant to be medium bodied, have light to rich red colour in your glass and taste of strawberries/raspberries (In Australia) it is more savoury when grown in other parts of the world, read Spain.

Green "as" Grenache, sarcastically Dr. Approved!

So having been given two rows of Grenache for our project: Maayan, Darren, Eran and I (all members of Postgrad Group 3) set out to make something that might resemble, even just slightly, Australia's finest. So far we are struggling a bit, the flavours just arent there for now (green grapes are never good for making flavourful reds) see above. We have completed the ferment and put the wine to barrel...there is still a long way to go...barrel age and malolactic fermentation needed to work their Juju. The grapes were havested a bit prematurely maybe a few weeks prematurely at that. A combination of possible disease issues (the topic of a future post no doubt), the viticultural department tired of early mornings (understandably) and time marching on in the term made us pick....the flavours were not really there but our wine is clean and sound if a bit acidic....

More to follow :)