Wine!!!

This all happened last week on Tuesday, which wasn't a good day for me. It was my first exam for the first class & I learned that I may have some issues getting a student visa for Portugal. No worries about that...yet, just a few paperwork things...hopefully. Anyways, on top of that I spent this last weekend fighting off a nasty cold, so that kept me from posting when I would have liked. Sorry, I don't think there will be another long pause like that for a good long while.

So one week ago we jumped on a tour bus right after taking our French & EU Law exam. We drove out of sandy pine tree country and soon we were passing by fields that looked like this...

Some of the little towns interspersed with the grapevines looked like poor farming communities--you can see one off in the distance. Not like rural Iowa though. It was more like little slum villages for migrant workers. So when the bus took several awkward turns down narrow lanes towards these buildings I wasn't too surprised that the buildings at the end of the lane, while larger than the village, didn't look too spectacular.

I was wrong! That was not our destination. This is Chateau Giscours...

They weren't really sure how old the building itself was, but wine has been made on this estate since the 1550's. The estate itself has over 750 acres, only a little over three hundred of which is in grape vines. The rest is something like this...

Why might you ask? Well until recently the Giscours was also a sight for polo matches, apparently fairly important ones. The building to the left of the actual Chateau is the visitor center/reception area, but it used to be the stables. Well, at least we know where we stand. Now polo isn't quite as popular...so it is cricket that is played. But that is neither here nor there...on to the wine!!

You already saw the first step, growing the grapes. After they pick the grapes they crush the grapes to get the juice from the berries. Giscours makes a type of read wine called Margaux, I'll tell you more later. At this stage the important part to remember is that they leave the skins and some of the stem material in contact with the juice. This give the juice its red color and drier taste. Red wine has more tannin, which it gets from the skins and stems at this stage of the process. The mix goes into one of these...

It is the primary fermentation vat, where sugars from the grape juice first become alcohol. Giscours has quite a few of them...

They are actually concrete, and they have used them for years and years. In fact, most of those doors lead to vats that are different sizes. They use the same vat for the same kind of grape, in the same way year after year. Consistency being the goal. The inside of the vats are coated on the inside with a protective epoxy resin. Our tour was taking place well after the season for fermentation so we could see the inside...along with the cleaning rags. The coil in the center helps regulate the temperature of the fermentation, another consistency device.

Now it is off to the secondary fermentation...aging. This can be done in barrels...

or in large stainless steel vats...

It is really going to depend on what you want from the wine in terms of flavor. It is obviously going to be easier to regulate the aging in the steel vats, but there is something special about the barrel with your company label on every barrel.

It also helps with giving the tours the right feel. After all, if you were to imagine a French winemaker, would you not imagine the little man in the back wearing the beret?? I think so. However, despite the somewhat romantic ideals of aging wine in barrels, there is the labor issue. As shown here where they are using candlelight to measure the color of the wine at the bottom of the barrel. When it changes they have removed the last bit of useful wine from the barrel. What is left is full of sediment.

Now the bottling. At Giscours they produce roughly 600,000 bottles of wine per year. All of it is bottled up by a machine like this, with every bottle being hand fed into the machine.

The rate per day is about 40,000 bottles over the six hour work day.

Now for the fun part. They make a Margaux wine in Giscours; Margaux is a Bordeaux wine, so unlike most American wines the French blend different kinds of grapes, usually right before bottling. The blend itself is often special to the actual Chateau, but must be within exacting standards laid out by French law. For the Giscours Margaux, the current mix is roughly 60% Cabernet Sauvignon and 40% Merlot. We got another wine from the region, called a Haut-Medoc, which is usually around a 50-50 blend of the same grapes. This one actually came from another Chateau owned by the same proprietor of Giscours, a Dutchman.

Here is our tour guide pouring us some wine in the visitor center. Looks quite nice for a former stable doesn't it? The two wines were both very good, as is every other bottle of French wine I have drank thus far ;) The Haut-Medoc almost had a spicy flavor and feeling, while the Margaux was...refreshing, more fruity than other Bordeaux wines, which doesn't take a lot, let me tell you.

A fun trip for me, especially after taking Stewart Burger's Introduction to Beverages at Iowa State University!!