Making Wine - Viniculture

Broadly speaking the Aussies disagree with the French. They say that although terroir is important what is really important is what a wine maker does with the grapes after he harvests them and gets them into his little winemaking shed (although in the case of Aussie wines it is generally not a shed and more like an enormous factory). For the French, wine making is an art that unlocks the mystery of the soil and in which the winemaker is some sort of sacred guardian of that process – the emphasis is on viticulture. For the Aussie wine making is much more of a science in which the winemaker applies techniques during the winemaking process that play the main part in dictating the style of the wine – ie viniculture is king. Obviously the Aussies and the French have learnt much from each other – the Aussies know a thing or two about soil and the French are no slouches when it comes to fermentation and blending but its worth getting the two positions clear before we muddy the waters. The difference between the French emphasis on viticulture and the Aussie emphasis on viniculture is as close as wine gets to a philosophical argument.

So what happens to grapes once they get harvested and dumped into the winery ready to be turned into wine. The basic stages are crushing, fermentation, aging and bottling and we’ll get onto that when I can find the time and the energy to write about them.