“The Spirit of Wine Sang in my glass, and I listened
with love to his odorous music, his flushed and
magnificent song.” – William Ernest Henly
After wines are sold and leave the ideal, temperature controlled conditions of our winery, they are moved around and can be subjected to many elements – like heat—that are out of our control. And one of the biggest threats to wine quality is exposure to heat. As winemakers, we must take steps to ensure sure that the wine you purchase is in the same condition as it was when it left our warehouse, even if it is exposed to heat and other elements.
Wine is made up of many components, one of the most important being proteins, which are responsible for many of the aroma, flavor and visual characteristics of a wine. Proteins bend, taking specific shapes according to electrical charges on the wine’s surface. When proteins are subjected to heat—such as when wine is left in the car during the middle of the day—it cases the proteins to shake. If they shake hard enough they become unraveled and fall out of solution—this is called a “protein haze.” We love the brilliant clarity of our white wines and want them to remain so. To ensure this, we fine our white wines with bentonite, which is volcanic clay of aluminum silicate anions. Anions have a negative electrical charge and bind to the positively charged proteins. To provide the greatest clarity at the lowest addition to minimize any loss of flavor or aroma, we perform a fining trial.
To perform a bentonite fining trial we experiment with adding different levels of bentonite (at one pound intervals). We add between one to five pounds of bentonite per thousand gallons of wine, and then let it settle. We then filter the wines and bake them in the oven to simulate the extreme temperatures that a wine might experience in its travels. At the conclusion, we examine how clear each bottle is, and when there is no difference in clarity between the bottles we know have found the right amount of added bentonite needed to achieve heat stability in the wine.
