Life is beautiful! 12 April 2006

A good vintage past, a lovely day: winemaker Chris Williams is content

It is one of those mythically beautiful Cape autumn days. It started off very cool, I found myself tugging on my rugged old work jersey as I left the house. When the sun did come up, the sky was a flawless cobalt blue, no wind but the air remained fresh, so welcome after a hot summer. As the day warmed up there was still the unmistakable sense of autumn in the air, but I guess as a winemaker one starts to measure one’s life in vintages as opposed to years, and I, as an ex-city boy, relish this connection with nature that my calling brings.

Why so upbeat? Well, my last 2006 wines went into barrel today. It is similar to tucking a young child into bed after a boisterous day. All the exertion and excitement of harvest is over and now the wine goes to barrel for the much quieter and more sedate process of malo-lactic fermentation, the last biochemical reaction a good red wine has to go through before becoming an adult and going on to greater glories.

I suppose I am so enthused and relaxed because I am genuinely delighted with the way this vintage has gone, power failures accepted. On paper, the chemical analysis of the wines is ‘perfect’, if such a thing is possible. Moderate alcohols, high natural acidity, lowish pH. But it is the organoleptic profile (that is anorak wine-speak for ‘taste’) of the wines is just so promising. Dense, just ripe fruit, clearly defined flavours and silken tannins. It is way too early to pronounce authoritatively on the vintage at this stage, but, touch wood, (36 month air dried French oak, preferably) it looks like the raw materials are there.

For me there is a ritualistic quality about putting the last wines to bed – that is, in barrel. In some way it is the completion of the first stage of the vintage. Energy has become light, light transformed into sap. Sap has become juice, juice become wine and now the intangible alchemy takes place in the coolness of the barrel cellar. Cellar hands have climbed back onto aircraft to fly away to the next vintage, not realising that the real magic happens quietly in oak cask, away from questioning eyes. Pre-cursors become flavours, tannins polymerise with each other and with anthocyannins, alcohol and acids become esthers. What makes wine transcendental happens on a molecular level. Organic compounds reacting with each other and micro-organisms dutifully doing what their genes command. It is not the model of your crusher or the number of punchdowns you have performed that turns good wine into great, it is something else. As a winemaker, all you have to do is ensure the right environment exists for this to happen, and that the environment is scrupulously clean!

And so as another Cape vintage is over, we sail into what hopefully will be a bitterly cold and wet winter, for just as the young wines must now rest after the mayhem of harvest, so do the rows of vines that encircle and somehow protect their offspring lying in the winery. Now is the time that the vines trans-locate the remaining carbohydrates in the sap back into the roots, so that it can shut down the trans-terranean parts of itself and go into deep dormancy, so that in the following spring the vine has the necessary energy and vigour to push the tender young shoots and leaves out into the universe to begin the process all over again.