Maceration is a winemaking technique with a surprisingly thin body of precise, publicly available information despite its widespread use. This article takes cold maceration (cold soak) as its central case and examines both the commonly cited benefits and …
How do you react when Brett comes up in a conversation about wine? Some may wonder why bread appears in the discussion — the resemblance goes no further than the sound of the word. What drifts from the glass is a distinctive smell rarely encountered in ev …
Preferences in wine vary widely, but few people seem to dislike the profound sweetness that characterises dessert wines. Even setting aside Château d’Yquem, the mere thought of a Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese from an exceptional vintage is enough to bring …
When making one’s own wine, few producers have never hesitated over the choice of whether to ferment with active dry yeast or to rely on indigenous microorganisms—so-called “wild” yeasts—present on grapes and in the winery. If the priority is fermentation …
Pruning is one of the most critical operations carried out in vineyards. In viticulture, pruning refers to removing unnecessary shoots and canes that have grown over the season, leaving only those required for the coming production cycle. This work is per …
This article focuses on the compounds extracted from wooden barrels during wine aging and their effects on wine. Discussions of barrel aging are often reduced to the notion of “oak aroma,” with an emphasis on aromatic attributes alone. In practice, howeve …
In the context of winemaking, you may have encountered terms such as “destemming” and “whole-cluster fermentation.” Both refer to how grape bunches are handled at the point of vatting. A grape cluster consists of many berries attached to a green, stem-lik …
Whenever I occasionally post about “natural wine” on X (formerly Twitter), those posts tend to be shared relatively widely for my account size. This simply indicates how many people react to this particular keyword. In recent years, especially in Japan, t …
In the context of mature wines—those that have spent a decade or several decades in bottle—the fill level is often used as a quality indicator. Some importers and professional merchants routinely assess fill height and decline to ship bottles that fall be …
Wine exhibits remarkable diversity in both flavour and aroma. Even wines produced in the same region during the same vintage never show completely identical sensory profiles. Moreover, when a single producer vinifies grapes from the same vineyard under id …
