After the party’s over 16 April 2007

Harvest and fermentation done – now the real work starts, says Francois Haasbroek

The best of times, the worst of times, said Dickens in The tale of two cities. The 2007 harvest has passed, another small chapter in a hopefully long tale for me. What have I learnt from yet another couple of months of sweat, stress, toil and the occasional beer? Mostly that I know very little… This has only been my third harvest at Waterford, with few if any similarities in those vintages.

Without doubt I was spoilt and (overworked) learning my initial craft under Neil Ellis. Neil made a few simple points which have stuck: (1) Do not call yourself a winemaker if you haven’t dealt with at least ten vintages with the same grapes. (2) Winemaking is easy – stick to the basics and pay attention to detail.

This is just what I will aim it in these notes for Grape readers: sticking to the basics, and going into some of the details (OK – maybe not too much details…).

Filling in the time
Possibly the question I get most asked is: ‘So what do you do the other nine months of the year?’ Well, not much really, it’s all done – the grapes are picked and (with a little help from yeast) got converted to alcohol and uncountable amounts of other flavour molecules. All done! I’ll shortly be off on three-month backpack experience….

Not likely! Eben Sadie once said that he works for nine months of the year then takes three months holiday over harvest.

This brings me to the ONLY definite thing I will state as fact about winemaking: bad wine can be made from good grapes (in which case I am unemployed), but great wine cannot be made from bad grapes.

So why is harvest the least of my worries? Because I have great vineyards and grapes to work with, I merely have to steer them in the direction we hope will lead to the best possible expression. I work the remaining nine months, and now this work has slowly but surely started.

Mastering malolactic
It’s from now till about mid-May which is stressful: the different batches of red wines (already fermented, that is) are slowly going through malolactic fermentation (MLF).

Technically this is not a fermentation process although carbon dioxide is formed. OK. To demystify and remove any romantic ideas you might have towards wine, here follows: A bacteria (and its relatives) called Leuconostoc oenos has a peculiar diet of the malic acid present in the new young wine. After ‘eating’ this delightful snack, it leaves us with lactic acid instead.

There’s a big difference between these two: the malic is more acidic in taste. Almost all red wines are encouraged to go through MLF to soften the wine and add complexity. (If not, the wines must be micro-filtered and heavily sulphured to stop this natural process from occurring in the bottled wine – a massive catastrophe.) At Waterford, all my 2007 vintage red wines (the alcoholic fermentation that turns them into wine all done) are currently undergoing MLF, in their 225-litre oak barrels.

White wines too
The white wines and our little experiment with blanc de noir are also demanding attention. Although much less physical work than the red wines, the white wines cause the winemaker to age prematurely. They are extremely fickle from the grape stage through fermentation: any lack of concentration or bad judgement translates into a loss of quality or worse.

My production of white wines is comparatively small – only about 2000 cases each of chardonnay and sauvignon blanc. So I’d better not mess them up!

The chardonnay is behaving well. After a rather complex blending process after it is now in lovely Burgundy barrels on its gross lees (skin fragments, dead yeast cells, bits of pulp and so on). The wines get some occasional ‘battonage’ – the fancy French word for stirring. When the bug bites (or stress levels get too high) we will put the wine back in the stainless steel haven where it will wait until bottling.

As for the sauvignon blanc: this never sees anything other than stainless steel tanks and machines. Currently the wine is also still on its lees post-fermentation, and cooled down to ten degrees centigrade.

… not to mention the pink one
The wine of real interest for me currently is the blanc de noir (called Rose-Mary after the grandmother of Waterford’s owner, Jeremy Ord). Its six red cultivars were pressed without skin contact (it’s the skins that give the colour) – so it has only a slight pinkish tint that diminishes during fermentation and fining.

The wine has just been lightly ‘fined’ with bentonite (a clay we get from Wyoming in the USA – yes, we import mud!). Because of electric charge differences, bentonite binds with proteins which we want to get rid of from the wine bind, and this settles in the tank. Then we can pass it all through a filter – a lightly non-invasive method to keep back the clay-protein combo and let the wine through.

The equipment we use for this seems very complicated – but half of the valves seem to have no purpose and be added by the Italian manufacturers purely to increase the price!

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Now for a well-deserved weekend, in the knowledge that my red wines are happily infected with the right sort of bacteria, and my Rose-Mary is literally chilling at –5 degrees centigrade.

My advice to all wine lovers out there: go and buy something different to drink, a name you don’t know, a price you’ve never paid, and a cultivar you can’t spell. There are so many amazing wines waiting to be tried – some to love, some to loathe, but nearly all interesting.