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WINEMAKING release bottle evaluation, and often for years and years after the wines have left the winery. Their job and their skill are not just tasting for today, but how the same wine compares to a month ago and what it might mean three years from now. My consulting crew was in considerable agreement about the points in winemaking at which tasting (and sniffing) are the drivers of decision-making. The first one, naturally, was the picking decision, the point at which serious winemakers insist on visiting the vineyard, tasting the fruit and passing judgment on the best time to pick. All my winemaking sources run tests and look at numbers from basic Brix and pH and TA to (in Phil Steinschriber's case) detailed phenolic profiles of hanging fruit. Those numbers are important for deciding when to start tasting and for treatment further down the line, but the picking date gets decided in the winemaker's mouth. This is an extraordinary act of vinous fortune telling. Grapes on the vine taste nothing like finished wine, which depends primarily on flavors and aromas developed during fermentation and aging. What few elements are fully formed in the grapes are covered up by 25% sugar and accompanied by zero alcohol. So when winemakers can find the right balance point in ripening grapes and think ahead to how the fermented juice might taste in the glass, that's pretty amazing. No automated lab analyzer can handle that job. The only way to develop that capacity for precognition is the same one that will get you to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. It's not so much a matter of sharp, acute sensitivity to different tastes and smells, though that helps; the heart of it is palate memory: the ability to generalize from tens of thousands of sips and put the one currently in your mouth into context. "The longer I make wine, the more I rely on my taste buds," Parker-Garcia says. "I've been making wine for 13 years, and I find "Consensus winemaking never makes good wine." —Ondine Chattan myself relying less and less on pH and refractometers." Steinschriber, who has been making the high-profile Diamond Creek Cabernets for 22 years, expressed sympathy for young winemakers who can't possibly have the taste experience he has at age 62. "I was trained as a chemist," says PetersonNedry, "and I love analytical tools, numbers. Early on I had trouble realizing that the most important analytic tool is organoleptic. It took me a while—two or three vintages—to decide picking decisions had to be on sensory, not lab tools, by walking the vineyard." The same logic applies to many of the other points in grape- and wine-processing, where taste has to rule. Tasting red fermentations to monitor extraction and tannin accumulation, for example, is the key to deciding when to press. And once again, that perception has to penetrate through layers of dead yeast and sludge and remaining sugar, not a simple task. Winemakers aren't likely to get it right the first time—or the first few times. Bernard Cannac at Heron Hill remembers that when Feedback in the tasting room S mall wineries that sell nearly all of their wine through the tasting room also learn from consumer opinion—but through direct interaction, not surveys or focus groups. The flow of folks through tasting rooms gives constant feedback about what works and what doesn't. Bernard Cannac at Heron Hill in the Finger Lakes will sometimes take a glass of a proposed blend into the tasting room and see what random customers think of it. Like vintners at many small wineries outside the wine glamour zones, Jim Pfeiffer at Indiana-based Turtle Run makes a little something for everyone, aiming for 30 different wines per year: everything from big vinifera reds to off-dry hybrids. T.P. 38 W in es & V i ne s January 20 14 he first came to the winery, the cellar crew started pressing red wines after a week of fermentation, like clockwork, because that's how they had always done it. He insisted on tasting the wine before doing anything, and proceeded to keep the must together for another two weeks. Different winemakers taste for different things. Steinschriber, whose Diamond Creek Cabs are famously high in tannin at release, makes a point of tasting for excessive tannin buildup during fermentation, since that would mean he'd have to fine later. Everyone tastes for balance, however they define it. Pfeiffer says he can taste the difference between glucose and fructose and spot the point at which the yeast move from devouring all the glucose to starting in on the fructose, which may be the point for arresting a fermentation for a sweeter wine style. "During fermentation," Booth says, "we taste all the wines every day, including sniffing the head space for aromas, to make sure there are no bad microbes of H2S. In the barrel program, we come back regularly to taste, make sure everything is developing right. No computer or HPLC test unit can do this yet." Going it alone? Sensory science is clear on the proposition that people's sensory equipment and capacities can differ markedly. Different people— even if they are all trained winemakers—show different thresholds for important compounds, react more or less strongly to more or less of this and that, and have a wide range of preferences for how wine should taste. Professional winemakers soon develop the ability to recognize and categorize attributes of a given wine, whether or not they like it; experienced palates can do a fine job describing wines they would never dream of having for dinner. Still, nobody's palate is flawless, and everyone I spoke to readily agreed that they were imperfect vessels, even after years of experience. Cannac remembers being in tasting classes at the University of Bordeaux and seeing the amazement on all the faces when some students could not detect high levels of some compound others picked up at minimal concentrations— followed by role reversal on the next compound that was ordered up. Group wine tasting can be a sobering experience. Winemakers do not, of course, get palateprofiled as part of applying for jobs. In my sample, only Booth had the experience, years back, of having to take a written winemaking test and identify a series of wine flaws to qualify for an early job. The assumption is that winemakers know how to taste wine, and so the responsibility for gauging one's