HOW IS WINE AFFECTED BY AGING

This wine club selection offers you three wines that have been aged before and after bottling. To put the winemaking process in the simplest terms, the winemaker harvests the grapes, presses them for the juice, ferments the juice into wine, and then they have a choice of either bottling it, or aging it first in a vessel and then further in the bottling before releasing it to the consumer market. Significant chemical changes will take place during this vessel aging and bottle storage. The term ‘aging’ can be tricky as it is also used for bottles that are purposely stored by consumers. This is not part of the winemaking process; however, it does result in more chemical reactions that change the wine. Also, the bottles that are candidates for this after-purchase aging had to have been aged during the winemaking process to qualify.

The two main factors that come into play with the maturation process is oxygen and tannin. There are different steps that the winemaker can take, such as allowing malolactic fermentation, clarifying the wine, taking measures to stabilize chemical changes, and of course placing it in vessels to mature, all of which expose the fermented product to air at some point. This exposure to oxygen exposure results in anthocyanins and tannins, which results in the gradual loss of free anthocyanins and the formation of stable polymeric (anthocyanin tannin) pigments. One notable effect that this oxidation produces, as you may have guessed from the word “pigments,” is that the wine changes color. A red wine, as more polymeric pigments are formed, shifts from red to orange to brick red. A white wine goes from light yellow to a browner hue.

As tannins take prominence in the absence of acidity, the wine becomes astringent. With more oxygen, such as when the bottle is opened, this astringency can dissipate a bit, but if the wine is aged further in the bottle after this maturation process, chemical reactions happen to the various types of components that produce tannin, linking and “flattening” them into a kind of mono-tannin, resulting in a velvety smoothness on the palate. The astringency of tannins also mellow after about an hour or more after the bottle has been opened for drinking.

There is a pre-winemaking factor in all of this in that that certain grape varietals are better candidates for making wine that can be aged than others. Notable examples are Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, and Zinfandel. They are usually varietals that are predisposed to tannin because they have either larger pits, thicker skin, or are conducive to countering volatility with higher alcohol levels because they are pulpier with more sugar for yeast to convert to ethanol. But there are also famous examples of appellations that lean heavier on winemaking manipulation techniques, such as Amarone, which blends three to four varietals that make an exceptionally light wine when left alone but when dried and “raisinated” before fermentation increase the concentration of their sugar and thickness of their skins.

For this month’s wine club, we selected a wine from an appellation in the Veneto region that somewhat mimics this Amarone technique. Our other two wines are from two renowned appellations in the same region, the Rhone Valley in France, one white and one red.