Last issue, we discussed the quest for a suitable vineyard and all the attendant issues. Now, we take a look at the finer details involved, especially with regards the tools necessary to farm your own wine.
By now, you should be very curious about the facilities available where the wine is made. Of course, many vineyards don't have their own production sites, and in those cases you have to build one of your own. This is the tricky part.
For this, you will need relatively broad prior knowledge of the wide range of different equipment necessary for the wine making process, and you need time to buy and install the equipment before your first harvest. And of course, you should have already visited similarly-sized vineyards to get an idea of what you need to work with.
First of all, you will need vats in which to store your newly-pressed grape juice for white wine or the grapes for red. The two materials normally used for vats are concrete and stainless steel. These two materials have very different effects on the wine during the vinification process. The latest trend these days is to use concrete vats without any lining inside, for the porosity of the concrete and all its cavities nurse the wine with micro-oxygen. On the other hand, the stainless steel vats are easy and comfortable to work with, because they often have built-in temperature control systems for regulating the fermentation. They are also easy to keep clean and free from bacteria.
Bacteria problems can be hazardous to your wine; you can lose everything you worked so hard for to bacterial infection. For this reason, very often when a vineyard is bought with old vats and materials, they are all carted away immediately and replaced with stainless steel ones.
Another material that has to be mentioned is oak, used in open wooded vats. This type of fermentation vat is predominantly found in the area of Bourgogne in France. They can also be enclosed and with built-in cooling systems and other high-tech stuff. And for these special vats, you need a very thick wallet too...
If you want your wines to mature in oak barrels, it will take you about five years to understand the different effects they may have on your wines. Your results may very well come out brilliantly on your first try, but beginner's luck does not mean you are in control of the result. This control and understanding takes quite some time to develop.
Barrels come in different sizes, different oaks, and with different levels of burning inside. There are several reasons why burning is carried out. First, the heating makes the wood bendable so that the barrel can be shaped. Then the heating mellows the bitter tannins in the wood that the winemaker does not want in the wines. Finally, burning could also add a dimension to the flavours of the wine. The barrels can be burnt in three varying levels of intensity. Do you want to use new oak or used oak barrels?
And if you go with used barels, how many cycles has it been through already? Or perhaps, you may want to mix new and old barrels for your wine. You see, there are a lot of interesting possibilities that will give distinctly different results.
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