Wine production is a very complicated process. One wonders how wine as a finished product was stumbled upon in the days of antiquity - it would have been grapes left behind so long that they had become rancid. I suppose if people were hungry enough there would be a need for persuasion to get them to eat the old grapes laying around. By then airborne yeast would have fermented the juice from the grapes and after consuming sufficient amounts the person doing the eating would start feeling a bit intoxicated. In time it is possible that people deliberately allowed their grapes to go rancid specifically so that they could get the feeling that they got from eating rancid grapes and getting intoxicated.
Part of the story of human societal development is this idea of humanity going from hunter gatherer to master of domesticated grain and meat. It is one thing to stumble upon things generation after generation but another thing entirely to engineer those those elements as everyday food provisions. That deliberate engineering of food circumstance is what is responsible for our ability to settle as humans in one place, form societies and start putting out ingenuity to other facets of human existence.
In the early days at some point someone got the idea that they didn’t have to just leave the grapes laying around so that they could go bad. The thought occurred that it was actually the juice from the grapes that was most important so they decided to extract the juice from the grapes and to patiently allow that to go bad. There was a bit of trial and error there before deciding exactly how much time should be allowed to pass before the juice was ready to be consumed so that it gave the desired intoxicating effect. Once that was figured out a new home-based hobby was borne and the information was shared among neighbors. This was the beginning of developing and slowly refining a sophisticated process - the process of developing wine.
Another step moving up the sophistication chain is deciding which grapes to grow. In the beginning no one was concentrating on varietals of grapes they were just consuming - by happenstance - what nature was creating. Once villagers realized that they could actually select which grapes they wanted to apply their process to there was a budding wine industry growing according to one’s tastes and preferences. At this point everything was taking place still rather randomly meaning things were nowhere near today’s level of sophistication.
Next up is the yeasts that digest the sugars in the wine juice to create alcohol. This process is called fermentation and it is carried out by yeast. In the old days, fermentation was carried out by what is called ambient yeast. Ambient yeast are yeast varieties that are in the air as part of nature’s natural course. This means that the wine maker doesn’t choose which yeast is used to ferment the grape juice - he must rely on nature’s choice. From one batch to the next, the effect will be different because there are random yeast acting on the wine.
What impact does the variety of yeast have on the end product? Winemakers these days rarely rely on ambient yeast because winemakers need to control the features of their finished product. If you put a label on your product you want quality control which means that every bottle should have “notes” that are at the very least similar so that when someone picks up the bottle they know what to expect. In order to achieve this level of consistency, the producer needs to figure out which yeast is best for the grape that they’re using.
What goes into selecting the most appropriate yeast for the a particular grape? Well that’s up to the producer. It isn’t always the case that a producer making wine out of a grape will select the exact same yeast as another producer making wine from the same grape. Each strain of yeast “interprets” the grape differently, highlighting particular notes within the range of flavors that the grape offers. For this reason selecting different yeast can produce a wine with distinctive subtle notes that another producer doesn’t have. So choosing the grape is the first decision, then hand selecting yeast is the next step.
If you are more advanced and willing to take risks you can choose between producing wine the conventional way or going with the organic or even more stringent biodynamic technique. Convention dictates that you select your particular grape or grapes for blending. After that you can control for your wine’s personality consistently by using the same yeast to bring out the specific qualities of the grape’s flavor.
Biodynamic wine production follows the same process except the difference is that instead of selecting the yeast, the wine producer relies on ambient yeast, which is naturally occurring yeast - yeast that is actually in the air. This means that one year’s production of wine might have an entirely different set of notes than the previous or future year’s. Another element of biodynamic wine production is that they rely on cycles of the moon for deciding when to plant, reap, and other vital decisions.
