How Does A Winemaker Make the Final Blend of a Wine?

If you have a very basic knowledge of winemaking it is easy to assume that the wine that is in the barrels is the final wine. In other words all the wine goes into the bottle at the end of the day. Well in the case of very large wineries that is often the case, however even very large wineries will go about the process of tasting the various lots.

Lots are volumes of wine that have something in common such as they represent wine made from the same vineyard on the same pick date. Later in the process the winemaker may decide to combine tanks of wine from the same vineyard but with various pick dates. To do this he will taste the various different lots from that vineyard and combine them based upon how well they work together as a cohesive whole, aromatics, flavor, color and mouthfeel are all taken into consideration.

In a large winery a winemaker may be dealing with a 100+ lots of wine and in the end he or she must bring them together into a smaller group of lots for the final blend and to eliminate the lots that are not considered good enough for the wine or are just not suitable for the wine profile the winemaker is trying to achieve.

In my case I taste through every single barrel and today here in South Australia at our little winery I will be doing just that. I start in the morning by drinking no coffee, no teeth brushing and no eating. What I do is open a lovely bottle of white wine at 8:00 am and have a few glasses prior to tasting. This cleanses my pallet and prepares my mind for the wine tasting ahead. I also grab about 10 of my friend George Riedel's glasses and wash them, of course with no soap and piping hot water.

Then Helen and I go with our sterilized and trusty barrel thief (long tub designed to pull wine from a barrel) and fill ten glasses with samples from 10 barrels. I then go to a room which has filtered air, white counters and specific light designed to judge color. There I start tasting through the wines, making detailed notes and deciding which of the barrels will be in the final blend and which will not.

The wines that are not going into the final blend are not necessarily inferior in any way, although that could be a reason, they may just be too much of a given layer within the wine. In other words I may have 5 barrels that are all from a certain pick date and section of the vineyard that yielded a great deal of tobacco notes, which is a very good thing when it represents a single instrument in the orchestra but in no way should it dominate. In this case a I may select two of the barrels and set the others aside.

On the note of Tobacco nuances in wine, I was once at my friend Charlie Trotters restaurant and I think he cooked me about 20 different courses and his Sommelier, Jason was beautifully pairing wines with every course. About mid way through the meal he tried to trick me by pairing Lebanon's Chateau Musar (A wine that has the most intense tobacco notes I have ever tasted) with a duck course. It did not work at all and I called him on it and we both started laughing as his fellow Sommeliers explained the trick to me. By the way the Chateau Musar is very enjoyable, not however with that wonderful meal.

While I am tasting Helen continues to work through the rest of the barrels and pulls samples from every single barrel. Then she comes in and starts tasting but never saying a word as the process involves for me a very quiet time of letting the wine speak while I listen.

Hope you find this interesting.