French Wines: Part One

Lecture 7: A discussion on French wines.

Have your lab reports at the end of the hour the results of the Friday laboratories are here for the p.m. and the a.m. you should have now in your hands the lab mouth runs through number 10 these papers are about today about a collection of rock lines going up

Through the laboratory number 10 you should also have the lecture outlines through seven eight that’s the lecture that we’re just about to start today and last time I gave you the date the lab reports are do outline and if you didn’t get it why you can get it for a mr.

Weaver or mr. Fong over and enology building now the references are now on French wines which we’re going to be talking about today and Friday are not very good Johnson’s book is has a lot of fact as well as fable in it seeming is true of the seaman’s book I’d appreciate

It if you don’t take out books on French wines a present time so the whole class can use them otherwise I’ve got to go over and put a lot of books on reserve some of which will be used in some ways won’t be used so if you want to look at

These books just use them in the library and we won’t have to put them on reserve now there’s a lot of them mystique I had called it here or a certain amount of snob ISM and certainly a lot of romance about French wines just quickly reviewing the bit three material it’s

The largest consuming country in the world it doesn’t make as much wine as Italy but it almost makes as much wine as Italy it’s certainly second or third largest acreage in the world grapes it has more different types of wine than any other country probably a greater

Range of quality than any other country it is a country that is a obsessed almost with its own image of what the wines of France mean to the French people even the lowliest peasant considers that the wines of France are a part of his French heritage and that

France is great partially because it produces French wines that whether that’s true or not that’s the impression you get and I think it is that will be true and we don’t quite know why this is true why should the French of all the people of Europe have developed this

Almost worship of the wine and worship of things connected with the volume it wasn’t always true during the Dark Ages the wines of Spain the wines of Italy the wines of Cyprus Madeira Crete were all better known in northern Europe than French wines were and were all highly

Praised I think that was because in that period of time people were interested in consider a lot of alcohol in the wines and those wines all had more alcohol in French wines it wasn’t really until after the Luiz started in that French wines began to be developed as a very

Special thing about of friends and it proceeded in in all the areas somewhat independently of each other because Eastern France was Burgundian southern France was English and the French monarchy had a special relationship to the champagne district so that each in their own ways gradually developed this tradition of winemaking and it actually

Reached its peak in around 1870 there were more grapes made at that time than any time in French history they were already covered in viticulture 3 the impact of flocks are on this industry and I won’t repeat that except to say that that had some good things

Happen to it as well it forced a whole new relationship to the variety picture all the vineyards haven’t been pulled out when because they were dead and putting them back they put them back primarily with good varieties it doesn’t take very long to debase a good vineyard it happened here in California during

Prohibition the only grapes that would ship east were Alicante Boucher’s and so forth thick-skinned varieties with lots of color they were gradually interplanet in the Napa Valley and you can still see vineyards with red leaf grapes in them in September and October those are the inner plants of the prohibition period

Just in Napa Valley so in a period of only 20 years there was a large implanting of new varieties well this probably happened many times in the past in France so that flocks are in that respect had a very good effect on the planning of grapes and and furthermore

It straightened out the rows it didn’t do anything else before 1870 the hole was the primary method of cultivating vineyards after that oxen were used horses were used and later of course machines were used and that of course made for better production less work and so forth now I’ve also taken up the

Question of appellation control II for French wines and bit three and I will not repeat that material here except to say that it limits the areas specifically it limits the varieties that can be planted and the varieties are listed plus they’re synonyms in some cases so there it can be no doubt about

What they’re talking about some varieties are listed for early retirement that is they will give you a few years in which to the variety the Gamay in the champagne district was such a variety the first laws of Appalachia modern appellation of origin for champagne were 1928 it was

Not until 1960 that the last gam A’s were officially pulled out and I have no doubt there’s still a few Gamay vineyards in the southern part of the champagne district they limit the production per acre and in general this is a pretty good rule I think and as I

Said to the class the other day looking at some of the pruning practices this year I’m sorry that we don’t have a maximum production per acre for California the French being very pragmatic people not only limited the production per acre but they put a minimum alcohol content on the wine so

That even if they tried to cheat one way they’re going to get caught up the other way because the more they put on it the less sure content they’re going to have therefore the less alcohol they’re going to have now the Appalachian origins has been considerably strengthened by the

European Common Market what is called in Europe the ECC or what we call the EC in European Common Market and the strength of it has been come greater now because England has an Ireland have joined the Common Market and presumably all the wines that go into the those countries

Will have to comply with the some sort of appellation of origin what the European Common Market does very quickly is that they agreed to abide by each other’s naming practices so that if Italy does not register by a certain time schedule Chianti in the European Common Market anybody can use it

So there is this great mad rush in the producing countries of Europe to register all the possible geographical Appalachians that they might want to use for the future and they’re all very busy in the process of that at the present time the this is further strengthened by what’s called the Madrid Lisbon

Agreements the Madrid Convention was in 1888 the Lisbon about 1930 58 1958 and both of these agree that countries will not use other countries geographical names for agricultural process products so that Norman butter cannot be produced in Holland and burgundy wine cannot be produced in the Rome and Bordeaux wine

Cannot be produced in Alsace and so forth these have assumed very big importance under the European Common Market let me say a few more words now about the climatic conditions it’s really pretty cold in France I these are the average mean temperatures for the warmest months in these different

Districts so you see that Cornell is just about the mean daily temperature in August is just about 68 degrees centigrade and here in Burgundy it’s about the same it’s a little cooler than that here up here in and Alsace and it’s also cooler over here in company and

Champagne and the really warm does deserve it down here next to the Mediterranean for himself so France in general is an area of rather cool climatic condition you can see how cool it is if you take 20 degrees 68 that’s 15 that’s 18 for the hottest month is is

Only 540 degrees for the hottest month so all the other months the other three or four growing months are going to be much less than that perhaps only 400 and 300 degree days or day degrees so that this is surely only region was very these are on the occasion room in region

2 for California conditions the loire are here for the trees because being the garden and friends and so for others the water is between 1 & 2 some years it’s 2 in some years it’s 1 well the variety of grapes planet has changed after falak serie and it’s still

Changing today it’s changing by the elimination of some varieties and by clonal selection of other varieties to get higher production and we talk about Germany next Monday I’ll have something to say about the importance of quality selection one of the defects of appellation of origin and I hope we

Don’t get that in California is that once you set up an appellation of origin for a region and you list the Brys it takes on a lot of effort to get any new varieties on the list so about the only two things you can do to improve the

Varietal plantings of a region is one to eliminate the bad varieties or two to find better producing clones or more resistant clones or easier to prune clones of varieties that are already approved the idea of green in a new variety from outside would require all kinds of congress’s and investigations

And experimentation and the hearing and the courts and finally it would have to go to the Chamber of Deputies and be made into a new law for that district I hope we don’t get to be that difficult in California if and when we do have appellations of origin California I hope

That some mechanism will be built into it so that new varieties can be brought into the district the instapage mod they call this the NC posh mod or the mixture of varieties that’s what that french word means the mixture of varieties for the region doesn’t change very much

Within short periods of time the harsh model of Burgundy is about a hundred years old hasn’t changed very much for a hundred years without of Bordeaux has changed more in the last hundred years than burgundy has there’s been more change in Bordeaux the change in the Alsace has

Been very rapid in the last 25 years so Alsace being a relatively young region has very rapidly changing selection of varieties just now coming into an appellation control V the mawar has really created very many Appalachians controlling yet they have them but they’ve not been worked on as

Much as they should be so they don’t have this much reputation they could probably be worked on a lot more all right so much then for the variety planning there the climatic conditions I’ve emphasized already France was very proud at the turn of the century of not only being the largest producing country

In the world at the turn of the century say since lost that to Italy but nevertheless they’re very close together but it was also very proud of themselves as the scientific masters of winemaking because of Louis Pasteur and that feeling that the French know the answers continues today one of the most

Difficult problems you have if you travel in scientific laboratories in France is the game of one-upsmanship that they play well after all it’s French therefore it has to be the best nobody is going to tell us from California or Germany or Russia or any place that’s best

We know the best we’ve been in it the longest look we had Louis Pasteur and they are still bragging about that they’re paying the way of a number of people from all over the world in may to transfer and French wines and French genealogy at the expense of the French

Government so this is a consciously thought they believe and it’s actually what the government sponsors that and that one time they did supply part of the equipment they had more textbooks than any other country had and better textbooks I would say that except a few French ones certainly a lot better

Textbooks than the Italians I had at that period of time just booked for book quoting one from the other and the the firm of DU Jardine saleroom produced and still produced but up till after the first world war more laboratory equipment for wineries and all the rest of the laboratories in the

World put together everybody had a du jour Dean Salomon Abby Lee ometer in American wineries it was the most popular one and this was true all over the world so the French should technically consider themselves to be the standard and it isn’t true anymore and it’s unfortunately not true

Because of the Industrial Revolution and the modern technical revolution simply passed them by while they were bragging about how good Pasteur was a lot of other new equipment came in and so forth the Germans for example in the Italians together took about two-thirds of all the winery

Equipment business in the last 50 years away from the French it’s only within the last couple of years that the new coke presses have been developed to the point that there people are beginning to use them and that’s practically the only contribution and winery practice that

The French have really made in the last few years they resisted for example in the Champaign district for more than 50 years after the Germans and the and the Swiss had discovered the virtues of glass line tanks or line tanks for white wines the Champaign district completely

Resisted it till well after World War Two and continued to use 50 gallon barrels which are wasteful and caused lots of losses and so forth at the present time there’s only one winery that has any wooden barrels in it in the whole Champaign district everything has

Been converted in the last 10 years but that was 20 30 years too late and so the Champaign quality second from that during that particular period of time well then does their commercial success continue deal also well they playing tradition first of all we are French we know better than

Anybody else how to make wines they have used the appellation of origin very effectively I think there’s no doubt that the the fact that the government itself guarantees that if you buy a Bordeaux wine that comes from Bordeaux the prestige of the French government is behind it adds a lot of confidence to

Two wine drinkers all over the world and since most other countries do not guarantee in the same way right down to the to the vineyard in some cases and certainly down to the village in other cases that has given them a lot of the prestige and given a lot of consumers

Confidence I think that also the the French have been very good in tasting their own waters I think that the French and Americans have been worse on French wines and the Frenchmen themselves it was the Americans that announced that 1959 was this year of the century and that the greatest wines that were

Produced in France will be 1959 that was all because two importers got stuck with an awful lot of 1959 wines and they had to get rid of in some way so they advertised widely they got a lot of their friends to to say that the 59s were the greatest wines of the century

And two years later the 61 came along which was almost twice as good in some areas and they were sort of stuck at that state where’s the French people were looking at it very moderately and saying well 59 is a very good year at some ECM and so forth but we’ve seen

Years rocket before inwe’ll two years Lockett again and the English have done some of the same kind of tricks is that so that this ability to look at their product with coal commercialize is I think in of the of the French wine industry and then of course their climatic conditions

Do permit them to produce a large number of types of wines they have a wide variety of climates and they made full use of these and still are well I propose now to take a little time for Bordeaux and a little time for Burgundy perhaps today and then take care of all

The other parts of the district of the country next time first thing about Bordeaux is I can never understand why people compare Bordeaux wines with California the misconception that has grown and has now gotten to the point of where the industry holds tastings with Bordeaux wines comparing them with

California Cabernet is first of all the Cabernet represents only a small part of the Bordeaux and supplies month there are very few vineyards that have even 50% Cabernet Sauvignon in the Bordeaux district so Bordeaux is not per se Cabernet Sauvignon it’s a mixture as you know from bit 3 of Cabernet Sauvignon

Cabernet Franc Malbec maralell 30 Gerudo and several other small amounts of other varieties even including Sigma care in Tantra do mayor District and anyway that’s one difference between precluded you seem to me in the comparison but the other and worse difficulty is that they’re not the same kind of one

Bordeaux wines in general run around ten ten and a half occasionally eleven percent alcohol a California Cabernet with less than 12 percent alcohol is considered to be very thin well when you consider what the difference of 1% alcohol it’s ten percent difference in alcohol it’s ten and eleven percent for

Example and these are a little bit less than that that’s a big difference in alcohol and it makes a lot of difference in the extract it makes a lot of difference in softening off the acid taste California Cabernet is because of their higher alcohol always tastes much softer and so

So you could take either one up as the standard that’s not the point they’re just not comparable if you use California standards to judge French Bordeaux’s then the French Bordeaux’s are going to be very thin if you use French standards to judge California Cabernet in California Cabernets are Algerian monstrosity with too much

Alcohol in them and too flat and not enough color in many cases so that I think that’s the difference that they differ in style they differ in fact they’re not the same now the soils a few years ago the French decided to put a full-time man on

Bordeaux saws and his name was Seguin he’s published several articles now he shows pretty definitely that there is no a one time saw of the Bordeaux region that even in one district there are several types of soils that the best soils of the Bordeaux region were the well-drained soils the best vineyards

The ones with the higher alcohol content the one with the more modern acidity the ones that were running eleven eleven and a half instead of ten 10 and a half alcohol were and we’re the ones that were the best they also showed that there were there was some retention of

Moisture in the good soils that they did not dry completely out the ROVs district for example which is largely great gravity doesn’t retain the moisture and also gets waterlogged at a very narrow limit in some cases so that you flood the water or you’re it’s too dry and you

Have this in one case flooded soil the roots growth is restricted in the other case it gets very dry and Ruth growth is also restricted certainly to finish up about that alcohol the great period of mordor wines was supposed to be in the period in 1860 and 1870 we do not have analysis

Of those wines most of the wines were only 9% of alcohol so the idea what is a great Bordeaux has changed in the last hundred years one hundred years ago they were quite willing to drink Bordeaux wines at lower alcohols than they do today that has to do I think with the

Technical improvement they do have summer rainfall and it’s a major problem 1964 fungus got worse and worse by Handley some people in desperation picked the 1964 crop before the middle of October and they made some fair but light wines the people who did not pick by that they had to wait two weeks

Before they could get in the vineyards and all which represents about almost two thirds of all the Bordeaux shadows made very thin wines they had to take them off the skins very quickly they had to pasteurized salt and because of the polyphenol oxidase content that was

Turning them Brown and some of the wines of the 1964 crop have been ageing and they’re already ready to drink or should be drunk already botrytis is the major one of the fungus problems what’s very good in the Southern District is very bad in the red wine districts which are

The main wines of the region and as a matter of fact just last year in a symposium in France they said that botrytis is the major viticultural problem of friends I think that’s maybe more true in California than we’ve been giving it credit for there’s been a lot

Of good fighters remember the martini to report on fungus disease of the Napa Valley mrs. martini and her husband made a survey of this and published in the American Journal technology a few years ago they showed that botrytis in many cases was above ten percent of the crop

Of the grapes picked late in the season in the Napa Valley and I’m sure in some cases that was not desired maybe in the whites yes not in the ribs now the next problem which I did not take up in viticulture 3 is why the mixture

In Bordeaux this has fascinated a lot of people and nobody really has the best answer paino was big expertise before going to cultural experiment station published reports some years ago based on the vintages of 1958 and 59 in which he said that the situation might be something like this the Cabernet

Sauvignon was a high card or a gas of grunt and now back was a high mountain castle right and that turns out to be true through California also largest percentage of the the acidity of Cabernet Sauvignon is tartaric acid and now baggies nowadays that’s easy to remember because now it goes with the

Melvin you see so you don’t have to think very hard on that now I’m gonna hop here you need the Cabernet Sauvignon because it retains its tartaric acid and it loses malic acid so in order to keep the wine from being very flat you need to have these

Two balanced find it well Hut year high dark dark acid would be desirable would have a very good balance and so forth and you’d be on up in the promo year however the high tartaric acid variety would be too acid because it would retain all of its tartaric acid you

Would also retain some Mallik but then you have the mana lactic fermentation to reduce the Mallik attitude so in the cool year the malic acid is melbeck is necessary to give you a high malic acid variety which with the malolactic fermentation will reduce the acidity down will buffer the pH up as it

Forms more and more lactic acid and so you’ll go from a high malic acid to the very weak acid lactic acid and the whole thing will be smooth Don now that was painless theory to a certain extent I bought that theory and I’m sorry that

Pay no left me in the lurch because he’s now said that it doesn’t work this way all the time if there are some cases that he can’t explain when they don’t fall on these in these categories but I think it’s a first indication is that in the Bordeaux district they plan a

Mixture of varieties so that they will have a better balance of acidity from year to year that I think is correct and I just how actually operate a given mixture nobody has done the necessary biochemical research but in the premise is generally correct and it may be that

In some cases in California from year to year we may find it desirable to blend varieties with different amounts of knowledge and lactic acid for the future I haven’t tried the new Cabernet varieties a measured their tartaric and malic acid contents but I hope somebody has because it’s certain that the best

Varieties in the San Joaquin Valley are going to be high tartaric acid variety and so if they they have a high techtronic acid variety that will certainly be useful the Cabernet Sauvignon is a high color variety primarily because there’s very small size of berries and therefore a large

Surface to volume relationship so that and as you know dr. singles have been working on this and showing that this is a fact that if you add more skins to the juice you will get more tannin you’ll get more color you’ll get more the more skinned you have so with the

Small buried cabernet sauvignon you get more flavor it also has the advantage that it’s pretty fungus resistant only one year since I guess we well we have the federal vineyard before we had the Oakville vineyard so in 38 years only one year in all that time have we seen

Mold on Cabernet Sauvignon in the middle of the Napa Valley that’s pretty good once out of 38 times we see mold on other varieties every other year Cabernet Franc has been adequately tested in California area of all places it’s lower in color and lower in flavor it does not produce any more than

Cabernet Sauvignon and it’s just as much trouble to train as Cabernet Sauvignon so that we see no reason for planning Cabernet Franc in California it tours a little earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon which might have some advantages for some people and for some unknown reason it does predominate in saint-emilion

That the other districts it’s in a minor variety the Merlot become popular more popular in this century and all that was popular in the previous century now the merlot has come to the to the front Merlot the amount that’s used in some areas you can’t find it in other areas that and vineyards

That accounts for as much as 75% of the total blend it looks like and tastes like some sort of sport or clonal selection from Cabernet the leaves are more entire but the clusters have the same general straggly look of Cabernet Sauvignon and in general I would say

That you would guess it more often than not to be a Cabernet and blind tasting but it is subject it has slightly larger berries and slightly thinner skin so the larger berries and the thinner skin you don’t get quite as much Cabernet flavor and it is more subject to fungus

Diseases there was some rot in Maryland this year for example which was not an extraordinarily wet year the Malbec as much as 33% is used in a few areas but in general about that has not been as successful in this century as it was in the last century if we don’t quite no

Way this is our own experience with Malbec which is more than 30 years now is that we have had a very hard time getting good clonal selections we’ve had one of them was virus infected we had another one that had some sort of defect in Flowery I think altogether we’ve gone

Through three clones in California the same thing is true in Australia also they complain about the Malbec clones not being normal and so forth it does have some Cabernet flavor and as you might expect is very subject to non-electric fermentation we had difficulty when we groom I’ll back here

At Davis in preventing the malolactic fermentation the problem of this mixture of varieties is of course that they don’t all ripen at the same time Cabernet Sauvignon ripens after Merlot Cabernet Franc ripens before Cabernet Sauvignon so that you’ve got to go through the vineyard twice or you’ve got

To pick one a little too ripe if the other one is going to be ripe or you’ve got to pick one ripe and the other a little too green the new tendency has been in the last 10 years to plant the varieties and solid blocks and pick them

At different times and then blend the wine after this defeats a little bit of the purpose of the malolactic fermentation but I think is more rational in one sense that you don’t have to go through the vineyard three times to pick the grapes up until 1964

That shot to litter one of the better and bigger shadows in the Bordeaux district they had to pick the whole in your three different times because there would be a vine of Cabernet here of now back over there this increased the cost of picking tremendously and and

That result was that they decided to change it they pulled out 1/4 the vineyard every year for four years and replanted the whole vineyard in Bronx and that allows them to pick each variety at its optimum attorney and also gives them the option of making the

Blend in whatever way they want in some years they might use more of the Cabernet I would think in the in the hop years and some of the cool years they might use more of the Malbec and then sell the rest of the wine as Bordeaux

Wine not as the communal I but just sell it as as Bordeaux red or me talk red something like that those of you haven’t had the three it better read that chapter on Bordeaux districts it’s still an area of large estates in general with some few exceptions the co-operative

System has been quite popular and so there are quite a number of large cooperative wineries for the small producers and in general they’ve they’ve kept the large shippers now the district is in the process of change right now the big shippers are having a hard time getting enough line to sell the chateaus

Can sell all their wine by themselves they don’t need the shippers anymore to to ship the wine to Hong Kong or Singapore or San Francisco they can ship it there themselves all they have to do is pick up a phone and call San Francisco and say do you want 50 cases

Of Chateau Margaux and the answer is yes they don’t need to go through crusade fees or session or any of the other big shippers that they used to do it to deal with it and there may be some very big changes take place in Bordeaux in the near future and Mouton Rothschild for

Example has decided now to since their name is worth so much they’re going to put out a whole line of Bordeaux wines under the Mouton today and distributed itself worldwide just one chateau they’re really taking the place of the shipping now I said in VIP three that the

Classification of 1855 that was a commercial classification that classified about 55 of the best Bordeaux shell-toes into categories one two three four five I said into three that that was out of date and perhaps out of date with the times as well it was based upon the

Prices that were paid for these 55 or 60 shell toes in 1855 it had been based upon two previous classifications of the wines of Bordeaux so it was not a new idea it meant a tremendous amount of money however to the four wineries that were classified number one their prices have

Always been from ten to twenty five percent more than any other shark toes there have guaranteed a sale every year even during the Depression years when they were having a hard time giving away wine in Bordeaux the big-shot toast maintained their prices pretty well the price of some shadows is more than twice

That of the next Chateau on the list in Sauternes for example Chateau d’Yquem regularly sells at 50% more than the next highest quality this is what I call the snob ISM of the French scene but it’s also one of the results of the 1855 classification there doesn’t seem to be

Much hope of changing it the people who got the classification number one or number two or number three are not going to give it up and so that I don’t see any really possibility but it’s all wrong of course first of all the shadows are not the same places in some cases

Just because it says shot to Margo doesn’t mean it’s the same shot to Margaux that was there in 1855 in fact they took a whole shot toe right next to Chateau Margaux and combine it with shocked Oh Margo in the 1950s so that’s not the same shuttle a skull moved

Across the road most of its vineyards they also brought on another shot tone the vineyard in that shop – over Thurs sometimes the shock tell properties are not all even contiguous they’ll have some a half mile down the road and they’ll have some around the shot toe or

Some not even very close to the chateau the winemakers have all changed Chateau haut-brion which was a great famous shot – asleep it’s 5:00 eventually passed to an American family who still owned it the Dylan family of Philadelphia well they had bad luck between 1920 and 1928 they got a winemaker who didn’t

Know the difference we all can wine made bad wines when everybody else was making good wines in 1924 and in 1920 and 21 to a lesser extent in 22 he was making just awful wines it just didn’t pay attention and wines got high and volatile acidity

Pressed them off the skins too soon and it was not until the Dylan sent one of their nephews there that after 1928 that they got the whole estate back and under control again and besides that the the whole idea of the the Chateau has changed in the 30 days they never

Declared a vintage unless it was good there were no managers at Chateau Lafite from 1871 to 1893 to 22 years that the wines were just not that good the rots fuels could afford not to have a vintage so they just sold all the shuttle Lafitte wine went into more know red

Bordeaux and me dog rid that’s not true anymore we don’t have that kind of idealist around the world anymore shuttle effete 1963 which was a perfect disgrace awful wine spoil line and so forth so that $16 bottle on the American market two years ago and the Americans drank it before you

Get any in foreign complex the big camino de oro Hotel in Mexico City sold it at $25 a bottle and had even the Mexicans drinking it at that price so don’t think that we’re worse off than other people it’s true that some Bordeaux shadows did not ship 63 as a

Vintage and also 65 was pretty generally skipped over so there has been some attempt to maintain standards that it varies from chateau du chateau paino starting in the 1958-59 when they were doing these same experiments also was working on time to present the same time as the bird was working on the same

Subject here French penis they came to the same conclusions in 1960s that you could press off the wine earlier between 6:00 and 9:00 bricks without having a low color content but that you would reduce the tannin content by securely present the same results in Bordeaux is here and therefore you would be better

Off if you wanted early maturing wines to press them in that range and that’s about 2/3 of the shadows now are pressing in the 6:00 to 9:00 darling area this means that they only need two years of aging before they go on the market it saves them the third year

Which was traditional before 1960 so now you can you can get already 1970 wines are on the market by the summer of 73 the 1971 wines will be on the market so they’ll have just a little bit less than two years in the world some of those shadows have resisted this about one

Third of them have and they’re still fermenting them down to one to two bricks and getting more tannin and then using three years of wood aging before they do the bombing there’s a lot of temperature control of fermentations going on now that’s a new development and that night had gone

Through the same cycle there as it did here in 1935 when say well first came out that night on the American market there were any number of people in the north coast that said oh oh been tonight that’s an inorganic material that’ll spoil the line well and bordello we

Broke our yawn and paino said well Ben tonight it has an earthy character we made some experiments at that time we extracted bentonite with water concentrated the water and then gave him tap water and see if they could tell it apart and aside from a little aeration

That had gone through the filtration and so forth we couldn’t find any taste and that night the bentonite is pretty pretty neutral material especially if you use a mixture of sodium and calcium at night so that nobody thinks of adding charcoal to bet knighted wines that we

Broke Ione preached at one time to take away the bentonite flavor and they’re using that night is the primary fighting agent in France now this blanket is in California and it’s also the primary fining agent in Germany at the present time the 50 59 gallon yes barrel is the

Standard Bordeaux container and if you can afford it the new ones but the new ones are for a different reason I think I can’t prove this I wish I could prove it I don’t think it’s because they get a better quality of tannin extraction and so well I think it’s just because there

Is no thing that’s been constructed by human beings that’s harder to take care of and keep clean than a 50 gallon barrel it will spoil while you’re turning around and I think the reason they use nuku preaches to keep from using spoiled barrels and just takes one

Squirrel barrel dilute it out and you can taste it a mile off even though you put 50 good barrels on top of it pretty hard to dilute out of moldy barrels Smith and I’ve had enough for their wines now that have not been a new cooperage that it had this cast

Character that my guess is that that’s the reason why the rich chateaus prefer to have new cooperage each year because they never held a moldy barrel that way they’re always using new clean oak barrels but I don’t think it’s because it has any particular effect on the

Quality per se it has an effect of course on the quality because of this fact that there’s just almost impossible to keep 50 gallons wrong without sponge you put so2 in it you get spongy wooden sides of the barrels and so forth fill up with lime water it’ll eventually rot

If you leave it empty you know the barrel will fall apart anybody that’s got a new idea of how to keep a 50 gallon barrel absolutely clean without any harmful ingredients hgw or anything else will have the world by the tail really get be very rich people

Because there are millions of 50 gallon barrels that are used around the world and they probably account for more wine spreaders than all your seat adapter that you can think of viticulture is practiced very well I think that helps the quality of the wines you don’t take

Very good care of some of our videos in California much as we are proud of them and and should be proud of them there are a lot of vineyards in California that have weeds in them and so forth some of the larger wineries down the valley have taken to grading the

Vineyards ABC and the a vineyards are the ones that don’t have weeds and I think this makes some sense where we’re on a moisture deficient ecology the idea of getting rid of weeds makes good sense to me there’s one exception to that anybody know what the exception is it’s

Right over here at Florin over at Florin the best okays brew in the areas where they had lots of weeds they kept the moisture content down so the toke aids would get nice and red in the fall so the growers used to go out and they’re

The buyers the shipper just to go out and pick the case from the weedy vineyards but that was sort of a rice weed and had a very specialized thing in general weeds don’t belong vineyards well I’ve already talked about the legal restriction nine percent as the minimum alcohol and ten

Percent for the district lines the per acre production is about thirty six and it was yes forty hectoliters would be ten hundred speedy gallons and two it’s about five hundred gallons per acre which is about three tons so the maximum yield is fixed at about three tons to

The acre now a word finished about will not get to Burgundy today the red wines are all have some varietal character that’s one of the easiest things about Bordeaux they’re not alcoholic they all tend to be on the low alcohol side they all have some wood character all the red

Wines have some wood character but not exceptional amount of wood characters not nearly as much as some of the wines that have been made in the Napa Valley I’ve had in recent years you will have to look for the wood character we’re going to taste it Bordeaux red on Friday

And you’ll see that you’ll have to look for it they have very little bouquet when they’re young and it’s rather hard to taste the Cabernet is out of the barrel in Bordeaux you taste them and if you if you know enough to look for the alcohol you’ll get some idea of how good

They are they’re very very thin and on the very very tart side well you’ll think it’s going to be a thin year and it will be a poor year they’re always dry on exception to the dryness and border ones with the vintage 19:21 which was a sister of all over

Europe and there was residual sugar in some Berto wines some people liked them very much and some people disliked them very much at one time I fell into a very pleasant group of people in Berkeley who had a large supply of 1920 and 1921 Bordeaux and I was the only one that

Preferred the 20s because they were dry the rest of people all preferred them slightly sweet but the industry itself makes the Birdo lungs drawing the red wines the negative things about them are the fact that they are sometimes quite thin and in the old days that used to be

Quite ten so that you would have some trouble and drinking them when they were young that’s no longer true at least for two-thirds of them and there can be volatile acid never terribly bad but once in a while you’ll find one of the modern wines one of the lesser chateaus

Where the winery people all went for a vacation in july/august barrels were not filled and the volatile acid crept up on them the white wines the soft urns are the sweet ones they all all have the same a variety there was the rest but they also have a botrytis character which is quite

Pronounced in some cases and they do develop bouquet with age an old soft turn has a different smell than a young bouquet the the negative factors about Saturn is that they can be too fungus light that’s when they have too much for trials and the Petridis is superseded by

Another fungus Aspergillus or penicillin and so you get fungus smell on the same tongue and they also have too much fixed so2 and too much free so2 for my taste almost always including traffic in the Groves well mr. Berg I agree with mr. Bergman well just forget the second laboratory

Is 87 the Braves were placing