GRAPES AND OTHER INGREDIENTS

There's more than one way to get started in winemaking. Consider my friend who, on a picnic outing with pals in the Napa Valley, pulled up beside a tractor hauling a trailer full of grapes. He poked his head out the window. "Got any for us?" he yelled. The tractor driver waved an arm. "Still some out in that vineyard," he said. "If you want 'em, help yourself." The surprised picnickers laughed, but in minutes they were on their knees beside the dusty vines, hacking with pocketknives at the clusters of grapes. Hours later, with a few hundred pounds of fruit in the trunk, they sobered up. "We didn't have the slightest idea of what to do with it all," my friend says. He called the owner of a beer-brewing shop and begged for a rundown on turning them into wine.

That was 40 years ago. He now owns a vineyard in Washington State and runs a business selling grapes to home winemakers around the country. He has since made many remarkable wines but swears that the Zinfandel made from those first grapes — which he and his friends crushed themselves that night — could hold its own against any of them.

Making good wine your first time out, or your seventh, is not such a difficult trick. The key thing is to find good grapes. That doesn't mean you have to haunt the Napa Valley hoping you'll bump into a generous grower. It does mean that before you start rearranging your garage or investing in equipment, you have to know what grapes you'll begin with. Put aside for now the choice between Zinfandel and Cabernet, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. Here's a rundown on more basic options.

Fresh fruit. Grapes right off the vine are the gold standard of winemaking. The most desirable varieties are in the species Vitis vinifera, the European wine grape. Unlike other grapes and virtually all other fruit, vinifera grapes ripen to have an ideal mix of sugar, acid, and flavor compounds. What you get, after fermentation, is wonderfully balanced wine with enough alcohol to stay fresh-tasting and stable for months or even years. What's more, the many varieties of European wine grapes have for centuries been bred and selected to differ in remarkable ways — some ripen earlier, some later; some produce wines with exceptionally deep color, or extra acid, or strong fruity or floral aromas. Cabernet Sauvignon, for instance — a king among wine grapes — is known to be a centuries-old hybrid of two venerable Europeans: Cabernet Franc, a full-flavored red, and Sauvignon Blanc, a grape that makes brisk, fruity white wines. Whether the grapes spontaneously crossed in the vineyard or were deliberately mated is not known. But clearly someone tasted the fruit of the union and chose to propagate it. Cabernet Sauvignon is now one of the most widely planted wine grapes in the world.

Luckily, you don't have go to Europe to find great grapes. Wine grapes in the vinifera species — as well as hybrids between it and native American species — are now grown in most of the 50 United States. Check first with the staff at a brew shop in your area to see if they offer fresh grapes during the fall harvest season. (Start asking in June or July.) Ideally, the fruit should be trucked from a vineyard within a day's drive — any farther than that and the grapes could spoil in transit. Ask the price per pound, and expect to hear that the grapes cost quite a lot more than the ones at the supermarket. Find out which services the shop offers. If you're hoping to make red wine, will the shop crush the grapes for you or rent you a crusher? If you're making white wine, will they also press the crushed grapes so you can take home just the juice, ready to ferment? Or will you need to rent a crusher and a press? How much will it all cost? (For details on procuring fresh wine grapes, including hybrids of American grape species, see chapter 13, page 167.)

Frozen grapes. Many brew shops now sell high-quality crushed red grapes and white grape juices (in making white wines, the skins are always excluded). They come frozen solid in small tubs and large drums. More than a dozen different wine grape varieties are sold. Here's a partial list of the red and white grapes that have been offered by a supplier that delivers them, frozen, to home vintners all over North America: Barbera, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Carignane, Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, Grenache, Merlot, Mourvèdre, Muscat, Nebbiolo, Petite Sirah, Pinot Noir, Riesling, Sangiovese, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah, and Zinfandel. If you, like many wine lovers, prefer your Cabernet softened with a dose of Merlot, you may be able to order a blend. Once the containers thaw, you simply add yeast and carry on as if you'd done all the crushing and pressing yourself.

So far, frozen grapes and juice are available in only a few shops nationwide, but you can also order them online or by phone (see page 255). One winemaker I met — a Californian born and raised in Italy, where as a boy he watched his father turn newly harvested grapes into wine — had made his first batch from frozen crushed Barbera grapes. With no knowledge beyond his own faint memory of the way things were done back home, he made a remarkably clean and well-balanced wine. He seemed amazed that anyone found it drinkable.

THE YEASTS WITHIN

For all but a half-century of the 6,000 years in which people have been turning grapes into wine, vintners simply crushed ripe fruit and waited. Nature, or God, would do the rest — and almost always did. It took Louis Pasteur, the nineteenth-century French scientist, to figure out that the agents provocateurs were living yeasts, sugar-happy single-celled organisms present on grapes and in every batch of fermenting wine.

With no encouragement, native yeasts at large in the winery or transported from the vineyard often spontaneously set to work on a vat of crushed grapes, starting a full-on "natural" fermentation. It sounds ideal — why should anyone interfere? — and, in fact, some modern vintners make their wines exactly this way. But free-range yeasts can be unpredictable, sometimes generating off flavors and odors, sometimes giving out before all the sugar is gone. Most modern vintners — and you should count yourself among them — hedge their bets and add...