This weekend our program (CIEE) brought students to the Spier Wine Estate in Stellenbosch for a wine tasting festival with live music! (CIEE paid for it, too) An excellent, if commercial, wine estate.
We spent the afternoon there and, when all our other fellow Americans left, Tom Parmer and I went to visit and stay the night at my friends of a friend (Thank you Doug Pierce!) Katherine and Andrew at their place Stellenbosch. Katherine is an American from Higganum, my home town. She studying abroad at Stellenbosch and liked it so much she decided to graduate there, becoming the first American ever to do so. Andrew is her husband.
Stellenbosch is a great town, very European, very chic with cafes and boutiques. Everything you could ever want in a college town. Plus, it's totally safe to walk around in at night. It's the second oldest European settlement in South Africa after Cape Town.
Andrew works as a business manager at Zorgfliet vineyards where he helps other smaller vineyards sell their product. This means lots of free wine tasting in his job description. A nice gig, right? He gave us a free tour of the cellar and a wine tasting!!! it was unreal, especially seeing the winemaking process.
A couple odd things about South African wineries: Most are not for profit. Rather, they're owned by wealthy businessmen who operate them as a hobby. Second, from the business manager himself: South Africa tends to export only its lowest quality wines, leaving the better wines in SA. The stuff you get in SA is quite good, and cheap.
Red and white wine use the same grapes, the only difference is that red wine retains the skin. Basically, white whine is much simpler to make. The grapes go through a series of conveyor belts and a de-stemmer. After cleaning they are mashed, the skins extracted, and sent into the metal fermentation tank for a year until ready.
Red wine has a few more steps. Once put into the fermenter, the skins of the grapes must be repeatedly “pushed down” into the wine to impart their flavor and red color since they float to the top. The wine must also be “pulled through” where it is sucked from the bottom of the tank and siphoned to the top to percolate through the grape skins, thereby getting more flavor and color. At some smaller more traditional wineries this is done by hand. And it's a lot of work!
Then red wine is transferred into oak barrels where it must condition for two years. Zorgfliet imports the barrels in from France. They cost thousand of rand. When the dutch originally settled the area they unfortunately found out that the warm climate means the oak trees they planted in Stellenbosch grew too quickly for the wood to have a high enough density to prevent wine from leaking out.
After two years, it's ready to drink! And damn is it good.
No comments:
Post a Comment