Resumo de Winemaking - New York Micro Brew

Natural or Modern Wine?
I get email all the time asking for instructions on how to make wine "the way they used to" or "the natural way, without chemicals." I always answer these the same way.
The history of winemaking has largely been one of following techniques that minimized spoilage. A lot of bad batches were made because no one knew how to prevent seemingly spurious spoilage and, to a lesser extent, control oxidation. About 250 years ago, it was discovered that certain sulfurous salts could be used to kill most of the troublesome bacteria and control oxidation that prematurely ruined most wines. From that moment on, winemaking changed.
If you want to make wine like the ancients did, ask someone else. I will not help you turn winemaking back into a game of chance. If, on the other hand, you want to make consistently decent wines from a variety of base materials, stay here and I will show you how.
Their are many ways to make wine. I could write a book teaching you many if not most of the methods, but you would finish the book without finding a single formula or recipe for doing so. Some of you would be thrilled, for you would truly know how to identify, quantify and adjust the many variables involved in making wine. You would be akin to chefs, able to envision, create and adjust as you go without need of recipes or further instruction. But many of you--I daresay most--would be disappointed at not finding simple recipes for making simple wines.
The truth is, most people don't really want to be chefs. They just want to be darned good cooks. It is largely for them that I have developed this website. But interwoven throughout is the knowledge which, if mastered, will allow them to go on to become chefs. Until they do, I have provided them with hundreds of recipes to guide them in making wines.
When I say I cannot know the precise chemistry of the base ingredients you might use, I mean this sincerely. Take strawberries, for example. Strawberry wine can be quite exquisite, but it can also be a huge disappointment. Commercial strawberries at your supermarket are picked 5 to 10 days before they ripen so they can be processed, stored, shipped, distributed, and displayed without rotting before you buy them. They typically are 5-7% natural sugars. Frozen strawberries were picked closer to or at ripeness and were frozen because they would not survive the trip to the supermarket any other way. They typically are 10-13% natural sugars. But if you go to a "U-pick-it" farm and pick fully ripe strawberries, they might be as high as 15-18% natural sugars.
If the recipe calls for "fully ripe fresh strawberries" and you buy yours at the supermarket produce department, yours will contain half the natural sugar that was intended in the recipe. Yours will also contain only a fraction of the flavor the recipe assumes will be present and the wine will suffer accordingly. And even if your strawberries are picked fresh from your own garden, their sugar, acid, pectin, and flavor components could still differ greatly from the strawberries I used because of different soils, average tempterature, rainfall, humidity, and variety of cultivar used. In other words, the chances are good to excellent that your strawberries and my strawberries will certainly be different. How then can the recipes be of any real value?
If you think of recipes as guides and you measure the variables you can, you will naturally find yourself adjusting ingredients to fit your circumstances. Bland fruit will compell you to add more fruit than the recipe calls for, but even this may not be enough if the flavor is really poor. This seems to be the case more often than not with peaches bought at the supermarket. You can usually add a pint of Peach Nectare per gallon of wine to a vigorously fermenting must and improve the flavor immensely. Frozen peach slices also possess greater flavor than most supermarket peaches. So, if the fruit lacks flavor, spike the must with morflavorful base. This may mean changing the character of the wine with, say, nectarines or kiwi fruit or fresh pineapple chunks.

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