Winemaking is a pretty picky business. "In order to make wine well, you have to be a perfectionist. It's a hindrance sometimes, because you want to do everything so perfectly," says winemaker Tim Peters.
A few weeks before the grapes are picked, the responsibility for those grapes shifts from the vineyard staff to the winemaker. "About two weeks before the grapes are ready to be picked, we go out and start doing vineyard analysis. Based upon those samples, we make a decision as to when the grapes will be picked," explains Peters.
Winemakers continue testing the grapes, juice and wine until it has been bottled. "A lot of it is done by taste, and a lot of it is done by chemical analysis. We're constantly trying the wines, trying to figure out what their taste profiles are. A lot of winemaker decisions depend on taste."
Experience and the type of wine dictate when they're ready to be bottled. Some wines are ready in six months and some are ready in six years. It takes a lot of patience, and winemakers quickly learn to be fairly conservative in their decisions.
"If you make the wrong decision, you have to wait a whole year to correct that decision. Wine isn't like beer, where if you make a bad batch, you order in more barley. With wine, you get one chance. A lot of changes that we do are done on a very small scale first -- one or two barrels. If those barrels do well, then the next year, we go through the same procedure on a larger scale."
Winemaking is an integral part of Christine Leroux's life. "It's a job you give your soul to," says the winemaker.
Though more and more women are becoming winemakers, men still dominate the field. "It's not a popular career choice for women, but that's changing. When you've got the right background, women are as good as men in the field. We do have that sixth sense that helps us, and we make good winemakers."
Some wineries grow their own grapes, some contract with outside growers and other wineries do some of both. Part of Leroux's job is to work closely with the growers. "The growers have the responsibility of taking care of the grapes until they come to maturity. We talk with them about the type of yield we want, which is very important for the quality of the grapes."
That's because you can't make a good wine with bad grapes. "With a good grape, you can make either a good wine or a bad wine. For us, the essential part starts at the vineyard."
Workers used to stomp on grapes with their bare feet because they didn't have any other means of squashing them -- and also as a means of extracting the color. But with technology, that has changed.
"A de-stemmer crusher provokes the splitting of the skin with two rollers," explains Leroux. "Red grapes are crushed, and the de-stemmer separates the stem from the grapes. Then, we put the skin and the juice back together. For red grapes, the color is in the skin, so we need to have the fermentation going with the skin. With white grapes, we separate the skin, because we don't need color."
Some wines are considered dry, but what exactly does that mean? "A lot of people have very different definitions of dry wine. Many feel that a dry wine isn't a fruity or a flowery wine. They want a dry wine that grabs their mouth and is really acidic. In the wine world though, a dry wine means there's no residual sugar left in the wine."
Leroux considers winemaking an art. "It's like taking something that Mother Nature gave us and trying to mold it into something that you know will reflect what the consumer wants and what you want. A winemaker can't always do the wine he or she likes. You always have to think of the consumer."
To Dennis Martin, who is a director of winemaking, winemaking is a great career. "The wonderful part of our job is the craftsmanship and creativity: taking the raw material -- grapes -- and converting them into wine. This is a natural process that has been around for centuries, and we can affect style and quality along the way."
Anyone considering starting a vineyard needs to keep this advice in mind. "In developing a vineyard, the grape cuttings are grafted on to disease resistant rootstock. And it takes three years before you can harvest your first crop -- a very small crop at that. In five years, you'll be in full production. A vineyard can live to 100 years, although normally they are replanted at 40 years, as production begins to decline or they become diseased," says Martin.
"I can't think of anything negative about this career, except maybe bad weather during the growing season and especially during harvest, which creates huge challenges. Wine critics can ruin your day, too!"