Mendoza (and Argentina in general) is well known for its Malbec wines because the grapes do well in the terroir, the ideal, predictable climate, and lack of bugs and disease in the region. It was originally planted in the Bordeaux region, used as a blending grape. The grape wasn´t know for it´s taste – “malbec” literaly means “bad mouth” in French. But it was wiped out in 1956 by frost, at which point it lost its popularity. It has found a home in Argentina and only in the past 10-15 years have Malbecs really taken off in the world market. More info on Malbec at Wikipedia.
We spent a week in Mendoza going from bodega to bodega (winery), tasting their wines and learning about the winemaking process. At each place, they give you a presumably required tour of the facilities and how they make their wine. Well, after visiting 12 bodegas and having 12 tours in both Spanish and English over the course of 12 hours, we felt like we could give the tour ourselves. So, here you’ll get the benefit of all of that in less than 10 minutes.
How Wine is Made (in Mendoza)
Grapes are usually harvested in the Fall, albeit some are harvested earlier and some later – it depends on the varietal and how ripe the fruit is. First, the grapes are dumped in to the first vibrating belt above that filters out small grapes automatically, and the workers manually remove the bigger stuff, like leaves and green, undeveloped grapes which give wine a very green, bitter and unpleasant flavor. You’ll taste this in cheaper wines because they don’t have this manual quality control process. The workers are also removing overly dried grape bunches, also known as raisins, which contain too much sugar. The excess sugar would make the wine overly alcoholic and thereby affect its taste, and since Mendoza produces grapes with high sugar content, they opt to remove those drier grapes here. In other appellations, like in France for example, they may keep those drier grapes because they need the sugar to bring up the alcohol level and fruit flavor of the wine.
The grapes then go through a destemmer:
Then, on the second vibrating belt, workers are looking for remnant leaves and stems. It’s a tedious job – cool for the first minute or two, like a new video game, but then becomes quite monotonous. This woman looks concerned not because of her job, but because I started to take a lot of photos:
The grapes, sans leaves and stems, are dumped in to these small vats which are then easily transported to the appropriate tank, which are the round caps in the ground.
Here you see the grapes being dumped in to a fermentation tank:
Again, this winery, O. Fournier, touts using gravity as an advantage in its wine making process. They don’t need to pump their grapes in to the tanks, they just dump it in. And that’s supposed to reduce the amount of processing done on the grapes and reduce energy consumption. I think it’s more of the latter. Fermentation To convert grape juice to wine, you have to let it ferment – yeast is added to the tanks which convert the sugar in the juice to alcohol. But before that even happens, some wineries actually chill the juice to a couple of degrees above 32 F, right after it gets in the tanks to delay fermentation and to allow the juice to absorb more flavor from the grape skins. The whole fermentation process takes about 20-30 days in total during which the winemaker is constantly monitoring the temperature and sugar levels (“brix”) to see when fermentation has reached a desired level. Here’s a view of the fermentation tanks at O. Fournier. These are made of French oak, only used for the top label wines because they are $36,000 each and imported from France. The idea is the wine will begin to absorb some of the wood notes from the beginning of the fermentation process as opposed to just barrel aging.
Most wineries, though, will ferment their mass-produced wine in stainless steel tanks because they’re a helluva lot cheaper:
Some wineries in Mendoza use cement fermentation vats coated with epoxy paint. I don’t think they do this in the U.S., so it was interesting to hear about it. The idea, so they say, is that the shape of the vats provide natural circulation properties during fermentation and that the cement provides good temperature insulation. The epoxy paint is used to prevent the wine from absorbing flavors from the cement which is quite porous. Inside the vat here you see a metal radiator, used to help control the temperature before and during the fermentation process.
Here they are at O. Fournier, recycling the grape mixture from bottom to top during fermentation. Again, they tout the idea that gravity is helping in the mixing process.
In some wineries, they have workers manually stir and mash up the “must” (grape mixture) using these long pole stirrers. Think of the little plastic coffee stirrers/paddles you get at Dunkin Donuts, but instead, imagine that it’s made of steel, 10 feet long, with a 1″ x1″ grate at the bottom of it. This is to ensure more uniform fermentation as well as continuing to mash up some of the grapes.
During the whole fermentation and aging process, the winemaker and his/her assistants are constantly monitoring the progress of wines, from checking temperatures and brix (sugar) levels during fermentation to continually sampling what’s in the barrels over the course of the wine’s life (“crianza”) in barrels. It’s quality control, folks. Here’s O. Fournier’s laboratory. In almost all of the wineries, they’ll have a room dedicated to this:
After fermentation, a hydraulic press is used to separate seeds and skins from juice:
Aging the wine in barrels After the fermentation process, the wine is stored in French or American oak barrels for anywhere from 6 to 24 months, depending on the winemaker’s preferences. The general idea is you want the wine to absorb tannins from the barrel wood, giving it different flavors in addition to the woody/oaky notes you can sometimes smell on the nose of a glass of wine. Tannins also give wine that astringent/dry taste that makes you want to smack your lips – think Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah. From a chemical perspective, tannins can be thought of as a preservative that allows you to age wine longer, where aging causes the wine to develop different (and better, depending on your tastes) flavor. In general, the more you age wine, the smoother, less dry, it will taste, and the color of the wine will be duller. The barrels are stored in a cool, climate controlled room – a wine “cave”. Some wineries have added form to function, like O. Fournier. Here, they consider it to be a work of art, literally. The cathedral-like space is set up to let light in from the ceiling in the form of a cross and doubles as an art exhibit with pieces hung on all of the walls in the complex.
Here’s another dramatic wine storage room at Bodega Salentein, also in Uco Valley. You can see in this photo that it’s an amphitheater where they’ve had piano concerts. The balcony above is the room where they have all of their fermentation tanks.
Your basic, non-touristy winery most likely has a more functional take to wine storage: it’s usually a large room/warehouse with cool temperature and stacks of barrels. Here’s the winemaking/storage facility in a tiny winery called La Azul (<40,000 bottles/year). The stainless steel tanks are right next to the barrels where they age their small production reserve wines. Nothing dramatic here – this is how wine is made:
Bottling and Labeling Finally, after the wine is done aging in barrels, it gets bottled, labeled, and packaged up for shipment. Interestingly, in Mendoza, the overwhelming majority (> 80%) of wine is made for export. Word has it that Argentinian tastes are changing to favor beer and soft drinks over wine. At some wineries like Achaval Ferrer in the Lujan de Cuyo appellation, they still bottle and label everything by hand. They can do this because they don’t produce that many bottles a year (< 500,000 a year). These guys consistently get 90+ points in Wine Spectator… and their wine is also > $70 per bottle, presumably due to the artistry, care, and manual labor that goes in to making the wine.
Many of the larger wineries either own or rent (mobile) machines that do the bottling and labeling process. Here’s a labeler machine doing a test run at Finca Decero winery:
And that, my friends, is how wine is made in Mendoza. Now here are more photos from our time there:
- Day 1 in Lujan de Cuyo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tony-chen/sets/72157623711247181/show/
- Day 2 in Lujan de Cuyo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tony-chen/sets/72157623866795566/
- Day 3 in Uco Valley: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tony-chen/sets/72157623739540745/show/