If you talk to just about any good winemaker, you will come away with the feeling that he or she has a vast wealth of winemaking knowledge to draw from, and that the winemaker consistently fine-tunes his or her approach to meet the requirements of a given wine. Yes, there are some winemakers out there who don't operate this way; they get by with a rigid, 'recipe' approach to winemaking. But this philosophy (or is it a lack of one?) is not sustainable in the long run.

One might think that recipe winemaking would produce the most consistent product - after all, most manufactured foods and beverages are made with rigid production techniques to ensure sameness. The reason this is not so is that the raw materials for wine - the grapes - vary from vineyard to vineyard and from year to year. There is no guarantee that a Chardonnay from one year will taste the same or have the same chemical parameters as that from another year - in fact it can almost be guaranteed that they won't be the same. By extension the specific winemaking practices involved in maximizing the potential of those grapes will differ.

There are numerous examples of the need to constantly reevaluate and modify one's approach. In the hot, dry 1991 season, grapevines in the Finger Lakes set an unusually large crop. Drought conditions in August caused the vines to suffer from a condition known as water stress, where respiration exceeded uptake. As a consequence, the grapes stopped ripening, and their skins developed a shriveled, 'orange peel' appearance.

Astute winemakers knew from their body of knowledge that this phenomenon would probably result in the release of higher-than-average amounts of phenolic compounds into the juice, leading to (in white wines) unacceptable bitterness and astringency. Appropriate measures could be taken, such as press fractioning and fining (more on these later). Any winemaker who didn't properly interpret these new circumstances probably made a wine that was not as good as it could have been. An approach such as "It worked ok last year!" would have been totally inappropriate.

I frequently describe my approach to winemaking as one of letting the grapes, juice or wine 'tell' me what to do to them. They can't talk, of course, but they possess abundant organoleptic and chemical information that can be accessed at any given time, and that information is what guides me in my decision-making. A competent winemaker has a huge reserve of knowledge to draw from, and can make creative decisions with confidence.

As a way of making you aware of the steps involved in turning grapes into wine ( if this was a viticulture and winemaking course we could go all the way and talk about turning sunlight into wine! ), my contributions to this course will present a simplified overview of each process. As I describe the process I will mention some of the variables involved, to make you aware of the choices facing the winemaker and the effects those have on wine quality.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning a few thoughts on marketing. Often the winemaker is lucky enough not to have to worry about the business aspects of running a winery. But in fact it serves the winemaker to have some understanding of the personality of his or her customer. Much of the wine industry was shaken up a few years ago when a survey found that about 95% of bottles purchased were consumed within 24 hours. That meant among other things that a great deal of wine was being subjected to 'vinfanticide'. Nowadays most commercial wineries are paying a lot more attention to producing wines that taste good when young. There's nothing wrong with that either.

There is still, and always will be, a market for wines that require extended cellaring. Many wineries do very well selling to the market niche that is prepared to cellar wines. As a general rule of thumb, the more expensive a wine, the greater the chances are that the purchaser will understand and appreciate the need for bottle-aging. So it is not necessary to make a $30 Cabernet accessible until several years after the vintage date, but one had better make sure that an $8 Cab tastes good by Friday.