Taking the Time to Reveal a Wine’s Soul

Patience is surprisingly delicious

Wine isn’t the only thing that improves with age, with any luck winemakers do too.

Over the many years of my career, I’ve constantly tried to learn, grow, and try new approaches – always aiming to craft wines at the very peak of my abilities.

In the past few vintages, that’s meant radically changing my approach to fermentation, moving to a simple idea with a long name – extended maceration.

Maceration is the period after we’ve harvested and crushed the fruit and it’s transferred to a fermentation tank where several things happen. The sugar converts to alcohol and at the same time the juice absorbs tannins, color, flavors, and aromas from the grape skins, pulp, and seeds.

For decades, like most modern winemakers, I managed fermentations of about seven to 10 days. The conventional wisdom was that if a young red wine spent too much time in the tank, it would take on too much tannin, making the resulting wine hard-edged and astringent.

With extended maceration, we go from that traditional week to 10 days in the tank to a month to 45 days. It means deliberately giving the young wine weeks more time in contact with the skin and seeds, which does increase the molecules of tannin in the wine but – and here’s the paradox – this increase in tannins and time ultimately decreases the ability to perceive the tannins in the wine.

Here’s why. Tannins are molecules and as the wine is forming, these molecules are released into the juice in greater and greater numbers. If you drain the tank too soon, you will indeed get a wine that gives a drying, puckering sensation because you’ll perceive that high tannin level. But when you allow those tannins to hang out in the wine for a long time, they do what people are known to do – they hook up. With time those single molecules join together into longer chains. When you drink the resulting wine, those long tannin chains essentially skate across your tongue making you far less able to perceive them.

Extended maceration reveals layers of complexity that might otherwise remain hidden — the voice of the vineyard, the nuance of the vintage, and a tactile richness that can only come from time.

I always knew that patience was a virtue but until this stage in my career, I didn’t know it could also be profoundly delicious.

Photo: Alexander Rubin