Sharon Bowman
Sharon Bowman
This was my joke!
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Eminent
- Thread starter Sharon Bowman
- Start date
This was my joke!
originally posted by fatboy:
typical exposures?
The lakes are long and rather narrow and run north to south. The vines are on either shore, usually not too high on the hill. The protective heat capacity of the lakes is very important for frost protection in winter. We had a moderately awful winter this last, and people reported that vines high on the hills or up on plateaus had very high mortality. Some of the highest lost 90%. And I'm sure this is despite them having covered the vines in dirt as they do every fall, trying to bury them above the graft.
Various preferences were expressed about which side of the lake to be on--it depends to some extent on winds, but some folks liked getting the morning sun on the west side of a lake to relieve frost and also to dry out the vines earlier in the day to relieve fungal pressure. But there are many vines on both sides of the deepest lake (which holds its temperature best in the winter).
Hey, check it out!
Christian Miller (CMM)
Christian Miller
originally posted by SFJoe:
Niagra, OTOH, is subtitled, "The foxiest American hybrid of them all."
Apparently a Concord X Cassady hybrid. Cassady, though, is labrusca.
Confusingly, and news to me, Concord appears to be a hybrid itself. It is named for the town of its discovery (the one in Massachusetts), and was not an intentional hybrid, but was wild labrusca that met some local vinifera on the sly.
Who knew?
OK, Mr. Smarty-Picky pants. We are all hybrids in our way. I was using the ITB colloquial version of hybrid, a cross between vinifera and native labrusca or rotundifolia, as the case might be.
originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):
originally posted by SFJoe:
Niagra, OTOH, is subtitled, "The foxiest American hybrid of them all."
Apparently a Concord X Cassady hybrid. Cassady, though, is labrusca.
Confusingly, and news to me, Concord appears to be a hybrid itself. It is named for the town of its discovery (the one in Massachusetts), and was not an intentional hybrid, but was wild labrusca that met some local vinifera on the sly.
Who knew?
OK, Mr. Smarty-Picky pants. We are all hybrids in our way. I was using the ITB colloquial version of hybrid, a cross between vinifera and native labrusca or rotundifolia, as the case might be.
Picky, moi?
But I had no idea that Concord had vinifera ancestry.
Christian Miller (CMM)
Christian Miller
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Wish they would try indigenous yeasts.
...I think you need to look more into what that would require. Do they own the vines? Are those vines farmed without pesticides and herbicides? Most probably not, if they don't own them. You need to have a thriving yeast population from the vineyard and in the winery in order for ambient (not indigenous) yeast to result in something other than ruining fruit. Knowing Andrew and Jennifer a little bit, I suspect that they would try ambient fermentation if they felt that the situation allowed it.
My understanding is that most of the "wild yeasts" get crowded out in the winery proper, so wild yeast fermentations are very dependent on the wild yeast that come in on the grapes themselves. Not my field, but are wild yeast of the sort beneficial for wines bothered by pesticides or herbicides? I could see some fungicides being a problem.
Personally, I don't see why some people get so agitated by the wild/native vs. inoculated yeast issue, pro or con. I've had great wines made from inoculated musts, and there is nothing scary or Luddite about wild yeast fermentation if you know what you are doing. Plus the lines can get very hazy; what happens if you isolate some native yeasts from your vineyard and inoculate with them next year? How about if your neighbor in the adjacent appellation then uses them? Someone in the next state? What if you start with native yeasts, but by halfway through the fermentation they've all been squeezed out by the exact same type of S. Cerevisiae that you used last year, or your neighbors have?
Christian Miller (CMM)
Christian Miller
That is a curious piece of news indeed. I'm falling back to we iz all hybridz.originally posted by SFJoe:
And thus being hybrids to my uninformed mind.
originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Wish they would try indigenous yeasts.
...I think you need to look more into what that would require. Do they own the vines? Are those vines farmed without pesticides and herbicides? Most probably not, if they don't own them. You need to have a thriving yeast population from the vineyard and in the winery in order for ambient (not indigenous) yeast to result in something other than ruining fruit. Knowing Andrew and Jennifer a little bit, I suspect that they would try ambient fermentation if they felt that the situation allowed it.
My understanding is that most of the "wild yeasts" get crowded out in the winery proper, so wild yeast fermentations are very dependent on the wild yeast that come in on the grapes themselves. Not my field, but are wild yeast of the sort beneficial for wines bothered by pesticides or herbicides? I could see some fungicides being a problem.
Personally, I don't see why some people get so agitated by the wild/native vs. inoculated yeast issue, pro or con. I've had great wines made from inoculated musts, and there is nothing scary or Luddite about wild yeast fermentation if you know what you are doing. Plus the lines can get very hazy; what happens if you isolate some native yeasts from your vineyard and inoculate with them next year? How about if your neighbor in the adjacent appellation then uses them? Someone in the next state? What if you start with native yeasts, but by halfway through the fermentation they've all been squeezed out by the exact same type of S. Cerevisiae that you used last year, or your neighbors have?
I think people go to school, and their teachers tell them to fear the wild yeast. And they never bring Paul Draper to class.
I imagine that most indigenous strains eventually get outcompeted by alcohol-tolerant guys during fermentation, but if you have a substantial population of something that does the job from 1% to 3%, it will leave behind its distinctive metabolites after it dies, and they will be in the wine. That, for me, is the difference between a monoculture of whatever yeast (or yeasts) is the last one standing and ferments the last sugars, and an indigenous ferment. The multiple yeasts can contribute from their various idiosyncratic metabolisms to the final flavors even if they don't make it to the end. The yeasts with low alcohol tolerance are probably better represented in the vineyard, and may be more reflective of terroir, even if they only ferment part of the job.
If you culture a strain that is dominant at the end, you get an alcohol-tolerant clone, but just one. If you innoculate with a bunch of that one, you miss the early metabolic contributions of the odd adventitious stuff that works well in high sugars and low alcohol.
This is just my model, of course, I don't have full support for it.
Though I would say that the "cellar yeast dominates" hypothesis seems less well supported in the minority of the recent literature that I've read.
Not so very long ago, on this very site forum bored, someone reproduced a publication (from New Zealand mayhap?) that studied yeast populations in the ferment as a function of time and also classified by whether they were inoculated or not. IIRC, what they found was that several different yeast populations would rise to prominence at different stages of the fermentation and that the identity of those yeasts bore little resemblance to the strain(s) used to inoculate in those cases that involved inoculation. Someone more motivated than myself can torment the search engine to find said article.
Mark Lipton
Mark Lipton
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Unknown
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originally posted by fatboy:
words is information. in the right crowd, "pizza wine" can be exactly teh right level of signal.
fb.
Fair point. I just cringe at the usage of cliches in general. They are so unoriginal! But there is probably no need for me to rant about that here.
And maybe I'm crazy, but I drink a very wide range of wines with my pizza.
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Everyone referred to red blends with some hybrid in them as "pizza wine." At Red Newt, one tasting room associate said she "puts a bottle in the red sauce and serves a bottle with the food."
That kind of language really irks me. I dislike typecasting and it seems so narrow to think of wines in just one way. (But perhaps it helps to present a clear sales message, so what do I know)
I also really dislike these cutesy expressions like 'pizza wine'. Why not actually describe the wine!
Grump expressed.
You've never had certain wines with pizza before? It's not academic. I feel it's the same way with "summer roses": who says they are just for summer? But that is the way they are portrayed. To me, a pizza red implies an easy drinking experience that implies fun and familiarity. It works as shorthand.
You've never had certain wines with pizza before?
For me, pizza essentially means crust cooked quickly with toppings, so I'll drink pretty much all my favorite wines from white to red, sweet to dry, thin to thick, with different pizzas. And when we're home, we make pizzas most weekends, so plenty of opportunity for variety.
But even if you're talking about a basic tomato sauce and mozzarella pizza, you can get away with a fairly wide range of wines gustatorily. At least for my limited palate. I think the main reason people want to narrowcast pizza wines is their assumption that it is cheap and forgettable fast food.
It's not academic.
I have absolutely no idea what this cliche is supposed to mean!
originally posted by MLipton:
Not so very long ago, on this very site forum bored, someone reproduced a publication (from New Zealand mayhap?) that studied yeast populations in the ferment as a function of time and also classified by whether they were inoculated or not. IIRC, what they found was that several different yeast populations would rise to prominence at different stages of the fermentation and that the identity of those yeasts bore little resemblance to the strain(s) used to inoculate in those cases that involved inoculation. Someone more motivated than myself can torment the search engine to find said article.
Mark Lipton
Torment reveals this thread, which is informative on this question for the first handful of posts and then jumps to a discussion of cuneiform. The citation is there, and I have the paper if anyone wants it. The simplified conclusion is that the yeast comes in with the grapes, and that sometimes you can have multiple cerevisiae strains acting at the same time in fermentations that are pretty far along.
Thanks to the kind lurker who sent this along.originally posted by SFJoe:
I wish I had access to this.
There is a lot of limestone, but it is unevenly distributed. There is enough that the lakes are supersaturated with calcium, and some of them precipitate calcite during the summer. The calcium in the lakes is increased by acid rain (the Finger Lakes are downwind of the Ohio Valley, which is where a lot of SOx and NOx come from in the US).
Christian Miller (CMM)
Christian Miller
Here is a handy synopsis of some southern hemisphere researchers' conclusions on the subject.originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by MLipton:
Not so very long ago, on this very site forum bored, someone reproduced a publication (from New Zealand mayhap?) that studied yeast populations in the ferment as a function of time and also classified by whether they were inoculated or not. IIRC, what they found was that several different yeast populations would rise to prominence at different stages of the fermentation and that the identity of those yeasts bore little resemblance to the strain(s) used to inoculate in those cases that involved inoculation. Someone more motivated than myself can torment the search engine to find said article.
Mark Lipton
Torment reveals this thread, which is informative on this question for the first handful of posts and then jumps to a discussion of cuneiform. The citation is there, and I have the paper if anyone wants it. The simplified conclusion is that the yeast comes in with the grapes, and that sometimes you can have multiple cerevisiae strains acting at the same time in fermentations that are pretty far along.