PART 1

Selecting the Vines

The right wine-grape variety for you is the one that ripens well in your area.

Being a home winemaker is a lot like being an amateur opera singer. Both activities entertain friends. When done badly, reaction can range from disgust to token tolerance. When done competently, reaction ranges from enjoyment to admiration for the performer. When done with excellence, the audience will stare in disbelief, rise to applaud, and demand more.

The purpose of this book is to bring the reader swiftly and surely to the goal of excellence. As I am a longtime grower and winemaker myself, be prepared to hear me say how I did it, but don't be tempted to follow. Rather, digest the information you find here and proceed as you see fit. Handling a living being such as a grapevine calls for skill and attention to detail. So does making wine. Both, to achieve excellence, must be done artfully. As all artists know, what works for one doesn't necessarily work for another. Same materials, same physical laws, but — voilà! — here a Picasso, there a Van Gogh. There's no way to teach the art; that comes from within. But if your enthusiasm waxes strong enough, art will break through. I've met many artists of the grape in my travels. All shared one common trait: they were determined, no matter what, to do their very best. It's my hope that the material in this book will help you do your very best with this delicate task of home winemaking.

The Secrets of Good Wine

There's a maxim among traveled wine drinkers that any wine tastes best in the region it comes from (and with that region's food). If that's true, then homemade wines must taste best when drunk at home, so if you are making exceptional wine to begin with, it doesn't get any better than that. There are not many peak experiences available to us for the dollar or so our homemade wine costs. My personal peak experience came during a lunch a few years ago on a sweet, dry, sunny summer day. I knifed a ripe cheese made from our goat's milk and slathered it on chunks of bread fresh from the oven, bread made from grain I'd ground by hand that morning. I washed it all down with a thick, oaky homemade Chancellor. All three foods are the product of predigestion by yeasts or bacteria. All three involve triple partners: goat, bacteria, and human; wheat, yeast, and human; grape, yeast, and human. Lunching in the center of such a maelstrom of interspecies cooperation and pregnant numerology, I never felt more at home nor more in the right place.

Auspicious years for humankind are often years of great excellence for wine, as the destinies of human and grape do seem forever intertwined. The immensely great year of 1945 springs to mind. Human and grape collectively sighed in relief at the end of the Second World War and went back to celebrating life with the finest vintage of the century.

"The secret of the wine is the grapes it's made from," says Bill Wagner, a longtime New York State winemaker whose Finger Lakes chardonnays can give any white wine a run for its money. The winemaker's role is to protect and preserve the quality of good grapes right into the bottle. Jim Mitchell of Sakonnet Vineyards in Rhode Island, who does as good a job with French-American hybrid grapes as anyone, quotes these maxims:

* The most important elements of great wine are, first, the grape; second, the climate; third, the soil; and fourth, the skill of the winemaker — in that order.

* The best wines are made as far north as a particular grape variety will grow.

* To produce great wines, the vines must suffer, rather like athletes.

Pondering this last, Robert Weaver, professor of viticulture and enology at the University of California at Davis, says, "One viticultural theory is that a struggling vine produces better wine than one that has better growing conditions. If this is true, the reason may be that the struggling vine has smaller berries than the vine growing under more favorable conditions. Thus there is more skin (which contains more pigments, flavor, and tannins) per gallon of wine than when the grapes are larger."

The elements for great wine are just the same for the home winemaker as for commercial wineries: The right grape variety in the right climate and soil achieves the right balance of sugar, acid, pH, and flavor components. When all these things come together, the results can be spectacular indeed. The world's foremost example is the Sauternes produced at Château d'Yquem south of the city of Bordeaux. Speaking of this wine — an incredibly luscious, sweet, long-lasting, golden drink fit for toasting the Second Coming — Émile Peynaud, the renowned French enologist, said, "If you could measure a taste, an odor, you would find a number value for Yquem that is ten times greater than for a white wine. There is an intensity, a concentration, a richness, a complexity of odor and flavor completely unique." Most wines can be imitated: "One can always copy them elsewhere," Peynaud said. "But Yquem is absolutely inimitable. We haven't even been able to imitate it in Sauternes."

Wherever the property, there is a variety of grape that will produce the most excellent wine possible. Your task, long before the first bottles come to life in your cellar, is to identify that vine, for, as Doug Knapp, former president of the American Wine Society, says, "The grape makes the wine." Attempts to produce a rich Napa-style cabernet in Minnesota may be doomed to failure, but perhaps that property could be the home of the finest Sabrevois in the world. So what if it's not Yquem? It's probably a much better Sabrevois than they can produce in Sauternes.

The Origin of Classic Wine Grapes

In order to find the perfect variety for you, it's valuable to look for a moment at the original home of Vitis vinifera, the classic wine grape, to see what its habits and needs are and evaluate its potential for your place. V. vinifera varieties have the potential to make the greatest wines. In areas where they don't ripen well or are otherwise hard to grow, hybrids of vinifera and American grapes (French-American hybrids) are often grown. American wine grape varieties by themselves can also be used.

Interestingly, vinifera is native to the same area of southwestern Russia as the original Indo-European peoples, whose prehistoric migrations carried the Indo-European language and the vinifera grape to all parts of the ancient world. Some scientists say the original home was around the Caspian Sea, while legend and tradition favor ancient Armenia. The philologists have the last word, however. The ancient Indo-Europeans most likely came from an...