Carol Fisher-Linn
Whoever thought that making some wines could involve Wasps, Meteorites and Tomatoes?
With the anticipated wine and beer festival this weekend in Ellicottville, this writer thought it might be fun to discover unusual tidbits about wines, and the processes by which some of them are made. Fortunately for us, craft beers are ubiquitous since EBC came on the scene and we are so fortunate to be able to learn so much about the beer making process from our craft brewers. But wines can be so mysterious. And who doesn’t love a good glass of wine? It was one of our old national founders, Ben Franklin, who once said that wine is “constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.”
Think about it. For consumption, wine was probably the safest and certainly the most beloved beverage throughout history. For centuries, the purity of drinking water was always questionable – wine was a safer bet. You find wine mentioned everywhere from Christian rituals (the real reason most young kids can’t wait to make their communion?) and pagan rituals consumed as a symbol of fertility, immortality, and divinity across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Today, wine is served in living rooms, patios, neighborhood mom and pop bars and in ritzy restaurants around the globe. How can something not be good when wine production dates back over 8,000 years and is still with us?
“How did it all start?”, you may wonder. Modern archeology still isn’t sure about the first cultivation of grapevines for wine use, but the theory goes that early human-like creatures climbed trees to pick sweet berries and likely collected them in a container. Without Tupperware or steel pots, they may have used pottery jars to hold their fruit. If the leftovers sat out and began fermenting, the sweet juices would eventually change character and taste, turning into a form of wine. According to this theory, Wikipedia tells us that things changed around 10,000–8000 BC with the transition from a nomadic to a sedentary style of living, which led to agriculture and wine domestication. This seemed to happen all over the globe from China, Egypt, Georgia (the Country), Iran, Greece, and Sicily with the earliest traces of constant production in Armenia. Dated to c. 4100 BC, the Armenian site contained a wine press, fermentation vats, jars, and cups. Numerous discoveries followed, and then, there is the biblical story in Genesis which mentions the production of wine by Noah after The Great Flood. (Hmmm, something about him getting soused and discovered unconscious on the floor by his sons. Egad!)
So, wine making has a long and colorful history. It also has oddities in today’s world as discovered in a 2014 article – 10 strange stories about wine by Nolan Moore and Jamie Frater. Take wasps, for instance: they love grapes. In summer a fungus (a yeast key in making wine, beer, and bread) grows on the grapes. The starter for wine needs this fungus but it dies in winter. Enter wasps – wasps eat their fill in summer; they feed the mush to their larvae, passing the fungi to their babies. When they mature, they reintroduce the fungi to the vineyards and start the process all over. So, next time you see a wasp in a vineyard, leave it be.
Music affects our appreciation of wine: a researcher discovered that music truly impacts how you perceive wine. Listening to dominant, operatic music leads participants to describe their wine as “powerful and heavy,” while listening to light music, they rate the very same wine as “zingy and refreshing.” What’s your background music doing to the taste of your wine?
In 2012 someone slowly aged some wine with a 6000-year-old spacerock, giving the meteorite wine a purported livelier taste. Our Canadian (Quebec) friends offer a fermented tomato wine named Omerto (omerto.com), there are non-grape fruits and grains used for wines – like rice, and a few others, really too unrefined to mention. And then, of course, we always have the bootleg stuff still made somewhere in them thar hills and, if you have money to burn the average bottle of Romanee-Conti runs between $900 and $1000 (a case of vintage 1978 sold for $476,280 in 1993).
I’ll drink to that! Know why we clink glasses? Instead of drinking out of a single pass-around vessel as was done in days gone by, we clink our glasses, maybe even slosh a bit into each other’s glass proving we haven’t poisoned your wine, and to prove we are all part of the group. Salut!