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The Lifecycle of Producing an Award Winning Bottle

Written By: Kasey Carpenter on Monday, October 1, 2007

What Are The Odds?

So you had a bad bottle of wine.  Don’t be so quick to blame it on the winemaker, as we are often ready to do.  This is a very touchy subject among collectors, but lets give a little latitude to the winery and take a trip down the life of a bottle of wine.

When you really sit down and think about it, the odds are astronomical. Especially troubling is the view from the desk of the winemaker (or his CPA.)

We will fast forward through the long odds of perfect site selection, reliable soil analysis, proper clonal selection with noninvasive yet effective inoculation against fungi, bugs, and all the various pestilences. We'll just start with an established, productive, viable and well-planned vineyard.

Okay. Now let's hope we had a good bud break and there were no late freezes that would shatter them and start the year off in a very bad way. Let's assume perfect weather. Long summers with cool nights, some fog, and no rain before harvest. Let's assume it was a banner year that all the critics will be hailing.

Now you have to pick it. What the birds didn't eat, that is. Well not you personally, you can't do it all by yourself. You have to hire workers if you can afford them, otherwise you better have a deep mailing list that promises higher allocations to "harvest interns." You have to hope they will be as selective as you have instructed them when it comes time to fill their bins. Let's assume they will leave the green berries and the over ripe. Lets assume they do a pretty good job of it all without carrying any sharpshooters into your as yet infestation-free vineyard on their boots from that mornings job across the river.

Now you have in your possession several tons of hand selected stellar fruit that you harvested at the maximum alignment of all the planets of acidity, sugars, physiological ripeness, etc...

It goes downhill from here.

You've thought all year about your desired fermentation method, asked around about the best yeasts for it, and have all of these brand new barrels of hand coopered French oak that may have cost you upwards of 1500 dollars each just sitting around invisibly shedding their worth with each passing day.

But contamination doesn't stop at the winery door. There's bret to consider, more terrestrial infestations from workers, equipment, etc.

So your juice is now fermenting away, crackling and popping through the winter nights, under your watchful eye placing your ears up against the barrels like an expectant father, hoping to hear those telltale signs of life.

And one day, anywhere from 3 to 18 months later, you feel that it is time. Unlike pregnancy where you have nine months, non-negotiable, here you have the added responsibility of determining where the peak in the bell-curve will be. You have to guess "will it get better than this if I let it sit a few more months? Or will it start that rapid descent into something else?" No pressure.

But again, let's assume your skills of deduction and foresight are right on the money.

It's time to bottle.

Do you use corks? Great, but beware you could lose the entire vintage if you bottle with contaminated corks. Like the guy in Brunello a few years back, an entire harvest gone.  So do you use chemically treated corks? Do you like the added hint of bleach to your wine? What about screw caps? Will the wine be intended to age more than a year? Beware that you do not stack it more than ten cases high in the warehouse or the bottom cases will fail as all the screwcaps will be bent. Even if you pay the best for the corks, getting the good ones, you know that one in ten will without fail... fail.

Buts lets assume you have the best corks money can buy and did a few lot tests of the corks to insure no TCA and such are present.  Moving on…

It is done. You have now bottled the most impressive juice to come from this region in years. The flagship of your name rests in these bottles. You pack them and ship them off, hoping for the best. Like our parents did with us, they created us, they schooled us, gave us their time and attention and what they hope was the best possible start in life. And like our parents, all the winemaker can do now is hope and pray that life outside the winery treats his kids well. But the reality is that you can never know for sure.

Okay, so the bottles are boxed and ready for transport. Does your shipper have a climate-controlled warehouse? What about humidity so the corks don't dry out? Does the co-lo site midway across the country have one as well? What about the trucks? And if the trucks are climate controlled, are they left on all night while the driver sleeps his required eight hours overnight in Phoenix where it’s almost ninety even at night?

Please repeat all of these above questions for the importer and the distributor. You see the odds slowly building up.

Then there is the next to the last step, the retail establishment. Where does your wholesaler decide to put your kids? This is tantamount to your high school guidance counselor - they put you where they think you should go. Are your wines stacked to the ceiling of a not-so-climate controlled wholesale club warehouse? Are they sitting in some retail chain’s warehouse? Are they sitting on a rack next to a glass storefront with five hours a day of direct sunlight? Are they being poured by the glass by a wine bar that doesn't gas or vacuum protect their wines so that they go flat and oxidized within 24 hours of being opened? Are they proudly displayed behind a bar under a halogen light on top of an espresso machine (I've seen this!) baking away? Does the sommelier know not to pair your chosen varietal with anything involving green bell peppers or goat cheese? Does the waiter know to decant it and le it blow off at least fifteen minutes before drinking? Does he know to pour your older vintages immediately?

Factor all of these things and you can see just how difficult it is to ensure that every bottle will taste the same as the day they were made. Think about this next time you read a wine critic's rating of a wine where he dogs it, yet you drink it and think "there is no way this should have scored a 55."

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