Tag: Branden Hamby

Even if you went to the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium and spent two days visiting the nearly 700 booths on its massive trade...

Thermoflash, known widely in Europe as “flash détente” or flash release, is a process of thermovinification created during the 1990’s in the south of France. This process was created to reduce the time of red grape fermentation and improve wine quality.

As of January 1, 2018, legislation for legal recreational use of marijuana has been passed in eight states including Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, and California. Some of these states are also the nation’s biggest wine producers. This begs the question on whether the introduction of legal marijuana use will disrupt the traditional wine industry in a big way. It may be too young to tell just yet but there are many arguments for and against welcoming this new industry.

Cilyo®, a new technique with several positive impacts including reducing the need of fining agents for must protection and the ability to add stabilized and improved press fractions to blends received one a WINnovation Award for its ingenuity and advancement in winemaking processes.

When thinking about the aromas of wine, most people focus on the fruity or floral sensations that arise from a glass; esters, specifically the acetate esters formed during the fermentation process, are responsible for the expression of those complex aromatics in wine. These esters are formed not only from the nitrogen sources, such as ammonium and amino acids, within the must, but also from the nitrogen found in nutrients used in winemaking.

Consumers don’t enjoy seeing haze or tartrate crystals floating around in their wines. Therefore, protein stability as well as the cold stabilization of wines happens in cellars all over the world. Winemakers and cellar crew dread the time consuming and energy-intensive process of stabilization by chilling, seeding, and racking the wine off the tartrate crystals or fining agents. Fortunately, breakthroughs in innovative technologies have led to the creation of products that stabilize the wine without going through this subtractive process.

“Not all tannins are the same,” explains Dr. Peter Salamone. “There are fermentation tannins, cellaring tannins, and finishing tannins that all add something different to the wine’s flavor profile and structure. The same can be said for enzymes.”