originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
originally posted by MLipton:
O., I don’t think that whole cluster fermentation means what you think. The clusters are still crushed, but whole cluster guarantees more stem inclusion. BTW, even CM isn’t intracellular fermentation. The yeasts operate on the whole grapes, but the fermentation takes place in the yeast as per normal.
Mark Lipton
Just to recap, in conventional maceration the crush happens right at the beginning, so yeast fermentation occurs in contact with the skins (generating, among other things, more tannin). In carbonic or semi-carbonic maceration, the clusters stay whole, and most of the juice ferments while still inside the grape (although some grapes at the bottom may be crushed by gravity and undergo conventional fermentation). This is the intracellular fermentation I am talking about. The skin does not come into play at this point, and fermentation is carried out by anaerobic, enzymatic metabolism inside each berry, i.e., without the interaction of yeasts (so the yeasts do not operate on the whole grapes).
But a crush has to happen at the end, to generate the juice to be bottled, at which point everything becomes conventional, and yeasts come fully into play. But the wine will taste quite different because intracellular has its own enzimatic chemistry.
The use of whole cluster at CdB appears to me to be responsible for the hint of semi-carbonic (those middle-eastern spices) that I found in a half-dozen recent cuvées (2013 to 2016), and I believe this is due to the little bit of time in which intracellular is happening inside the whole clusters before the crush. Destemming makes intracellular impossible, but it will happen naturally within the whole clusters until the moment of pigeage (not necessarily immediate).
I may be wrong about this being the source of these spice aromas, and François doesn't make this connection explicit in the interview, but whole cluster should correlate with a degree of intracellular happening before pigeage.
