Page 12 - Grapevine July-August 2019

In The Winery

2.0 grams per liter tartaric addition. 100-milliliter lab blend. If we keep track of what
7. Continue to add to the number of samples you we are tasting, or testing, and select the trial we
care to do the trial on in standard logical incre- prefer, one can mathematically calculate how much
ments. of the given addition is needed in a tank of known
quantity of juice or wine. One can also extrapolate
Set Up the Tasting Trial this out to larger volumes in the laboratory should
that be desired to work beyond a 100-milliliter
1. Pour about 50 milliliters or a quantity one sample.
desires to smell and taste, of the base wine,
into a control glass and place it in the left hand Spicing it up!
glass in the tasting area. (One should always
taste against a control) Taste Left to right. Once the first set of trials is mastered one may
2. Pour the trials to be tasted, made in steps 5,6 build on to the next step projecting out what one
and 7 above, in increasing increments in each may want to do with the wine. This could eventu-
wineglass progressing from left to right. Mark ally, and perhaps should, build out to treating large
their contents. enough samples that one could cold and protein
3. Add to this flight any wines from past vintages stabilize the wine in the lab, filter to the projected
you may want to review or any other blind sam- desired micron size and taste with a panel.
ples from other producers you may care to use
as a benchmark. Mark their contents. Double Checking the Results
4. Taste and smell each wine several times. Go
through the flight and detect what wine may From experience, one can get so creative in a lab
best match or improve the desired style one is it can be difficult to trace exactly how one arrived
trying to achieve. at a certain desired concoction. Copious notes
5. Select the match and leave the room for 1 to 2 should be kept and most often one can trace their
hours. steps. When in doubt; however, re-perform the
6. Return and re-taste to confirm your decision. steps with each addition to reestablish and confirm
the same results. This extra time is well worth
Should chemistries play an important role to doing before stepping into the cellar.
reviewing certain additions be certain to run a
necessary panel of lab test to ascertain the prop- Summary
er numbers are also achieved. One may need to
balance taste, flavor and chemistry to make some Given time and experimentation with this system
tough choices. Have all the data necessary and many blending trials with additions will become
available to make those choices. easy and systematic. Trials will often take less than
ten minutes to prepare and one may taste at sev-
Calculation: eral points during the day or use extra time to per-
form lab test to confirm desired objectives.
Once the fear of the metric system is overcome
and confidence is achieved, the calculations Other Helpful Tips
become very simplistic. Let’s take the above as the
example. If we dissolve 1.0 gram of tartaric acid Keep in mind not to over scrutinize your accuracy
into 100 milliliters of wine we now have 0.1 gram in the laboratory. By this I mean make sure that if
of tartaric acid in every 10 milliliters of wine. From we measure something very tightly in the laborato-
this base if we blend 10.0 milliliters (one-tenth ry make sure this action will be able to be duplicat-
gram of tartaric) into 100 milliliters of fresh wine – ed outside the lab. It is not uncommon, early on,
this represents the equivalent of one gram per liter. for winemakers to get extremely exact in the lab
If we were to have used twenty milliliters that only to step into the cellar with less exact control
would represent two grams per liter in the small over what they had just experimented with. Food

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