| MAIN PAGE |
| The Wine Page |
| Ingredients |
| Wine Equipment |
Dan’s Cellar Notes
May 2003
Making Wine Sur Lie
Whether you make wine from grapes or from kits, stabilized juices or sterile musts, you have the choice of vinifying your wine with the emphasis on fruit and freshness or on creamy complexity. No single factor determines the nature of the final product. Certainly the raw material you start with is the biggest feature in the wine character equation. But once you have your crushed grapes, or your kit in hand, how can you influence the final results? One way is to decide whether or not to age your wine sur lie, or “on the lees.”
The term “lees” refers to the spent yeast and other solid matter that falls to bottom of your fermenter. We have to distinguish between “gross lees” and “fine lees.” The gross lees are the yeast deposits that fall out during the most active phase of primary fermentation, usually within 7-10 days after the fermentation actively begins. If we let wine rest for too long on these “gross lees”—more than a few weeks, for instance—the wine may become tainted by a bitter, cheesy flavor and aroma known as “yeast bite.” This is caused by the decomposing of dead yeast cells.
If, however, we rack the cloudy wine to a new container, taking care to top it up or otherwise exclude air, we could choose to let the wine sit on the new deposits—the fine lees—for several months, or even a year or more. This extended contact with fine lees can have a magical effect. It tends to introduce a creamy, velvety texture, along with nuances of flavor and aroma that are more mature, more complex, more vinous than they might otherwise have been. Sur lie aging is probably best illustrated in fine French champagne. The wine undergoes a secondary fermentation in the bottle, and, therefore, remains in contact with this small yeast deposit for up to a year or more while the wine matures. This gives fine champagne a creamy, slightly yeasty flavor and aroma that complements the stark, high-acid fruit typically chosen by the winemakers. Sur lie aging is also characteristic of the best Muscadets from the Loire Valley. Top makers of the great white Burgundy wines from the Cote d’Or not only age their Chardonnay on the fine lees, they stir the lees weekly—or even daily—keeping the wine cloudy until they are ready to finish and bottle it.
If you make your wine from a kit, you can try sur lie aging so long as you aren’t dead set on having wine to drink in a few weeks, as promised on the package. If you’d like to test the effects, here’s a great experiment. Buy two boxes of the same premium Chardonnay kit. Make Batch #1 according to the directions. For Batch #2, don’t bother with the bentonite finings at the beginning of the process. You will be allowing the wine to age in bulk, and they probably won’t be needed. When the specific gravity falls to about 1.010—usually after about 7 days—rack to a clean, sanitary carboy with a fermentation lock, leaving the gross lees behind. Add the metabisulfite packet that came with the kit, but do not add the sorbate or the isinglass finings. Set in a moderately cool, fairly dark corner. About once a week stir up the fine lees using a sanitized stainless or plastic rod.
Batch #1 will be in the bottle in 6-to-8 weeks if you have followed the kit directions closely. Be sure and set aside a few bottles where they won’t get drunk up for several months. After about 6 months, add the isinglass finings to your 2nd batch, and allow the haze to settle out over a period of a week or two. Now rack to a clean carboy with a small dose (about ¼ tsp) metabisulfite dissolved in some cool water. Don’t bother with the sorbate; it’s not necessary. When the wine is perfectly clear, bottle it and let it rest for two or three months. Now gather some friends around you and compare a bottle of Batch #1 alongside a bottle of Batch #2. They will be very different wines. Both should be good, but one will be fresh and relatively full of fruit flavor, while the other will be something else entirely. The aroma will be headier. The flavor will be rich and smooth and lingering.
You can age nearly any wine sur lie, but Chardonnay shows perhaps the most dramatic effects. Other good candidates, among white wines, are Pinot gris, Viognier, and Sauvignon blanc. This treatment isn’t as common with reds, but its popularity among some fine winemakers is on the upswing. It can profoundly affect your Cabernets, Syrahs and Zinfandels.
Sur lie aging is but one of the many tricks of the trade we have at our command to make the wine we want to make, rather than a wine whose character is wholly dictated by the vineyardist or the kit designer. Enjoy!