Making White Wine

In the September 2014 issue of Wines & Vines, author Clark Smith, wrote about Four Ways to Make White Wine. Since we are growing white wine grapes, I found this article to be quite interesting. The four methods include:

• METHOD NO. 1 Totally reductive. From crushing to bottling, inert gas protects grapes, must and wine from oxygen at every point.
• METHOD NO. 2 Hyper-oxidized must treated reductively after fermentation.
• METHOD NO. 3 Structured wines incorporate tannin as a positive element.
• METHOD NO. 4 Clay jar wines (known in Italy as ‘orange wines’ and in Georgia as qvevri wines) generally are made from semi-aromatic varieties.

For each of the above methods, Clark also lists examples, techniques and comments. The methods as they are presented are easy to follow and it takes only a few minutes to read the article, a good use of time while sitting at the computer.