Sweet, Reinforced and Fortified Wines

Grape Biochemistry, Technology and Vinification

Fabio Mencarelli, Pietro Tonutti

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118569214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Food Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Wines from Grape Dehydration is the first of its kind in the field of grape dehydration - the controlled drying process which produces a special group of wines. These types of wine are the most ancient, made in the Mediterranean basin, and are even described in Herodotus. Until few years ago, it was thought that these wines – such as Pedro Ximenez, Tokai, Passito, and Vin Santo – were the result of simple grape drying, because the grapes were left in the sun, or inside greenhouses that had no controls over temperature, relative humidity or ventilation. But Amarone wine, one of the most prized wines in the world, is the first wine in which the drying is a controlled process. This controlled process – grape dehydration – changes the grape at the biochemical level, and involves specialist vine management, postharvest technology and production processes, which are different from the typical wine-making procedure. After a history of grape dehydration, the book is then divided into two sections; scientific and technical.

The scientific section approaches the subjects of vineyard management and dehydration technology and how they affect the biochemistry and the quality compounds of grape; as well as vinification practices to preserve primary volatiles compounds and colour of grape. The technical section is devoted to four main classes of wine: Amarone, Passito, Pedro Ximenez, and Tokai. The book then covers sweet wines not made by grape dehydration, and the analytical/sensorial characteristics of the wines. A concluding final chapter addresses the market for these special wines.

This book is intended for wineries and wine makers, wine operators, postharvest specialists, vineyard managers/growers, enology/wine students, agriculture/viticulture faculties and course leaders and food processing scientists

Part 1

History

1

Sweet Wines: The Essence of European Civilization

Attilio Scienza

Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

Quis non malarum quas amor curas

habet haec inter obliviscitur?

(Among such delights, who cannot fail to forget the sad cares that passion may bring?) Horace, The Book of Epodes

1.1 HISTORICAL PATH

The aim of this chapter is to cover the broad subject of sweet wines throughout European civilization. A historical path will guide us from their origins to the present date.

The following are the constant elements in the production and trade of sweet wines:

– sweet wines have always been considered as luxury goods and imported by merchants;

– ordinary wines were normally produced and consumed within the local area, whereas sweet wines were generally produced close to commercial areas such as harbours;

– for light wines, climates and soils are key factors in order to obtain certain features; the quality of sweet wines, however, is more influenced by technology in the vineyard (choice of grape variety, late harvest) and in the cellar (concentration and stabilization techniques);

– consumption of sweet wines has always been regarded as fashionable rather than as a complement to food (unlike dry wines); as with all fashions, the consumption of sweet wines has had its own ups and downs, but its importance in the production of wine on a worldwide scale is always high, even though the market offers a full range of alternative drinks.

In Les Memoires de la Mediterranée (1999), Braudel claims that it is no great effort to feel at home within the familiar Mediterranean environment, whether in Venice, Provence, Sicily, Malta or Istanbul. There is an endless theme that links these places with their glorious past, through the names of their wines (especially the sweet wines). These places are the borderline between prehistory and our traditional history. We can identify this story with the birth of the first agricultural civilization not just in the Mediterranean region, but throughout Europe: the Fertile Crescent revolution.

1.2 ORIGINS

Wine is the symbol of the ancient peoples who developed in the Mediterranean region: the cradle of civilization. The first Sumerian evidence in the Fertile Crescent goes back to 3000 BC. The myth of wines spread throughout Aleppo, Ebla, Mori, Ugarit: the tablets of Paleo-Babylonian archives contain names of feasts and banquets where wine played a central role.

The origin of the word wine, ‘vine’, in Hittite means ‘stick of the Bacchants’; this identifies the sacredness of its use. Throughout the Mediterranean, we have similar words in the various linguistic groups. Even if they do not sound close, they share a common semantic root: wo-no in Linear B, woinos in Greek, wo-i-no in Mycenaean, g-vino in Georgian, yayin in Hebrew, vinum-vinum in Etruscan and vinum in Latin.

The Sumerian pictograms indicating the vine, the vineyard and wine are very similar to the ancient signs TIN and GESTIN. They are interpreted as a grape bunch and a pointed amphora. The correct translation of the signs of the ideogram GESTIN-HEA is not ‘white wine’, as it was believed in the past, but ‘vine + sun’, which literally means ‘dried vine’, therefore ‘raisin’ (McGovern, 2003).

GESTIN SA also means that wine is red, and it is followed by several adjectives such as ‘good, sweet, pure, new’.

The adjective –LAL occurs quite frequently too; it means honey. As a matter of fact, honey was frequently added to fermenting wine must, in order to preserve it longer; in Linear B script, the ideogram ‘wine’ is often modified by associating the word ‘honey’. The ideogram GES-IN DURU (interpretation reported by the Chicago Hittite Dictionary) means ‘fresh grapes’, while GESTIN generally indicates wine; if associated with DU-GA it means first quality wine; –VS means second quality and HALLUM is a wine which becomes vinegar. In the Mari archives, an account book of the court mentions the existence of a bitter wine and of a good one: the expression SHA SHATE' BELIYA means ‘[of the quality] which is drunk by my lord’.

Why was this wine sweet? The clay tablets on which the administrator of the royal warehouses carefully recorded wines constantly show the logogram GESTIN-HAD-AV or GESTIN UD, indicating dried grapes; they were widely used for food rations, as an offer to the gods or as an ingredient in medical preparations.

The red wine SA GESTIN KUB was diluted with water in order to better symbolize blood: this is clearly stated in many Ugaritic prayers of the Near East.

In the Hittite and Thracian traditions, offering sweet wine was a privilege of the king: a precise social symbol of power. In the Hittite tradition, it is through the power of sweet wine that the King-Priest Ullikummi is able to capture the snake Illuyanka. This representation often occurs in Greek mythology: a further piece of evidence of the assimilation of the oriental culture.

LA'L GESTIN-KU was the sumerogram for a natural sweet wine that could not be consumed in ordinary situations; it was precious, so it had to be offered to the gods (Gennari, 2005).

There is evidence of a preference for the sweet taste of wine also during the Egyptian transition: the jars in the tomb of Tutankhamun contained sweet wines. It is actually during the period of the New Empire that we have the first evidence of the use of heat to concentrate must; this technique was used to produce sweet and alcoholic wines for long storage.

Almost 1500 years BC, when Egypt was ruled by the Hyksos, a Semitic people from Syria and Palestine, sweet wines started to be produced in the town of Avaris, in the Nile delta. This was discovered in the mid 1990s, when archaeologists found a structure for pressing grapes and identified a vineyard called Kaenkeme, where a wine ‘… which was sweeter than honey’ was produced. Through the analysis of remains inside the ollas, molecular archaeology confirmed that the wine was red. The red writings (ostraka) on the jars stated the production areas, the style of the wine and the addition of resin or terebinth (Pistacia terebinthus). The indication ‘sweet’ (vip) is the most frequent one, even though it could also have marked the addition of figs and honey.

Vine and wine are also often indicated by the term kur. Kurum has the semantic value of red wine, karanu in Akkadian, carenum in late Latin and careno in ancient Italian, with the meaning of cooked must. This shows how the practice of drying grapes and concentrating must through heat had the same importance in the production of sweet wines. These two techniques were often used together. There is a city in the inland of Judea called Lachish where archaeologists found an Iron Age jar (second millennium BC) with ancient Semitic inscriptions like ‘wine made with black raisins’, ‘smoked wine’, ‘very dark wine’; this confirms the habit of mixing wine from dried grapes with must that was concentrated through direct contact with fire, which gave the wine a smoky-caramel taste.

The terms that we find in Ninurta's Georgics, dating back to the second millennium BC, refer to sweet red wines, with an explicit reference to blood, as they were used in rituals. For these purposes, people chose vines yielding wines that were light in colour and had a yellow rim, so that the wine looked like blood without the addition of water, as required by the ceremonial. This is the reason why in Magna Greece and Sicily we can still find such grape varieties as Frappato, Nerello and Gaglioppo, low in total anthocyanin and high in cyanin, which is responsible for the light yellow nuance in wines, especially those obtained by drying grapes.

In the ancient Greek tradition, men who were responsible for the community agreed that sweet wine was the best way to establish a new relationship with foreign people (philoxenìe).

Homeric poems are full of episodes, actual topoi, where sweet wine was the unifying element of relationships among men.

In Book VII of The Odyssey, among the Phaeacians, Zephyrus blows and dries the ripe grapes in the sun; in Book IX, Ulysses offers Polyphemus the sweet, black wine that was given to him by Maron; in Book XI a sacrifice is offered mixing milk, honey and sweet wine; in Books XII, XIII and XIV there are references to the colour of wine, which is red or looks like fire.

In the Homeric poems there are many descriptions of wine evidencing the poet's attention to the aesthetic side of wine. Colour was almost always red: purple wine (to extinguish the funeral stake), rubicund nectar, rubicund wine, reddish wine, black wine, vermilion liquor, ancient wine, purple nectar, rosé nectar, sweet wine, black nectar (Maron's sweet wine), soft wine, incorruptible wine (sweet, alcoholic?), soft liquor (sweet?), smoky wine (alcoholic), sweet grape's liquid, tasty wine, powerful wine.

1.3 DIFFUSING THE MYTH OF WINE

The wine known as wine par excellence, which was traded by the Phoenicians and Greeks throughout the whole of the Mediterranean area, where the symposium ritual was spreading, was almost certainly a sweet wine. It was a luxury good destined for the upper classes and it was also among the most valuable goods for exchange. Only wines with high sugar levels could travel for such trade purposes.

We usually ascribe the improvements of viticulture and enology to the meeting of the oriental and occidental cultures. In fact, new productive varieties were introduced, along with drying techniques to improve the ageing potential of wine. Moreover, new containers were more resistant, easier to produce and to transport: further facilitating trade. The most important innovation was the intuitive introduction of the Greek emporium. Wine was transformed from a simple alimentary product to a bargaining chip; moreover, it was associated with the worship of a god who was the protector of viticulture. Such an interpretation, which could seem ideological, is broadly justified by the fact that wine and vine have a huge symbolic importance in the European culture, especially in religion and politics (for ruling and controlling). Possibly, this is the reason why innovation was limited to small daily steps forward by the growers to lighten their work load or to improve the productivity of their plants. Enology underwent even slower changes, and ancient techniques still survive in some parts of the Caucasus, Portugal and Greece.

Production techniques were highly influenced by the development of the local economies and consumption habits. In places characterized by subsistence farming, wine was produced for self-consumption. In such cases, the main features of mixed farming did not change until the arrival of the American diseases. In those places where grapes were grown for wine trade, farming and winemaking techniques underwent several changes. Vines were located along the main trade routes and near harbours, thus they benefited both from proximity to a border (improvement by comparison) and from consumer feedback, demanding new wines made using new techniques. The development of colonies in South America, South Africa and Australia, together with the increasing cost of transport, led to the production of wines and spirits that, through fortification, could both resist long trips and be less bulky to transport. Innovation led to the selection of the most suitable grape varieties for over-ripening (or for noble rot) and to winemaking techniques involving the addition of high levels of sugar and alcohol; as distillation spread, alcohol was used to fortify musts and wines.

Over the centuries, winemakers tried to meet the taste of consumers who, according to the current fashion, wanted wine to be white, red, alcoholic, fortified, sweet, and they adapted viticulture and winemaking according to the market.

The so-called ‘permanent evolution’ phase started towards the end of the seventeenth century, due to three key factors: knowledge, competition and investment. Producers aimed at improving quality wines for long ageing, sparkling and sweet wines.

The development of chemistry and fermentation allowed the improvement of yeasts and the introduction of sulphur dioxide (SO2) as an antiseptic and a preservative. The other huge factor was the industrial production of bottles and corks.

1.4 CLIMATE CHANGES, THE DEVELOPMENT OF VITICULTURE AND THE PRODUCTION OF SWEET WINES

During the third millennium BC, the habits of the Sumerians and their relationship with the gods reveal that the earth was threatened by unpredictable violent forces; heavy rainfalls arrived inopportunely, flooding entire villages. A rupestral relief from the third millennium shows the Hittite King pouring sweet wine for the god of the sky, Tarhunta, asking him to save his vineyards. A Hittite tablet about climate changes states ‘([Observe]) raisins. As they preserve wine in (their) heart, […] (even) you, god of the tempest, preserve prosperity, vigour,...