Maceration is one of the factors affecting wine quality

Factors Affecting Wine Quality: How Winemaking Techniques Influence a Vintage

What factors affect wine quality the most? While grape quality and climate play a significant role, post-harvest winemaking techniques such as maceration, fermentation, extraction, and aging also influence wine flavors immensely. Last year I attended a special tasting dinner hosted by the owner of a winery in Red Mountain, Washington. Over dinner, we sampled a number of recent vintages from the estate, and the lead winemaker offered us in-depth insight into the winemaking techniques he uses to bring out the best flavors in the wine.

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What affects wine quality

What Affects Wine Quality? Your Guide to the Growing Techniques That Matter

What affects wine quality? The answer to this question isn’t so simple. A number of different factors, from the age of the vine’s rootstock to the vineyard’s climate, can dramatically impact how a wine tastes and how long it will last in your cellar. If the winemaker starts off with underripe, poorly grown grapes, then the resulting wine won’t taste elegant or refined, even if the producer ages the wine in the finest French oak. To invest in the highest-quality wines on the market, it’s a good idea to understand some of the growing techniques that affect wine quality, including climate, vine age, soil composition, pruning, weather, and harvest dates. By considering each of these factors as you shop for collectible wine, you’ll learn how to identify the best wines from the top producers–and be able to pick out unlikely gems from lesser producers as well.

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AOC Wine Guidelines

Tension in Loire: What the Controversy over IGP and AOC Wine Guidelines Means for Collectors

This summer, Sancerre winemaker Jean-Jacques Auchere awoke one morning to find that almost 6,000 of his youngest IGP (Indication Géographique Protégée) Sauvignon Blanc vines had been ripped out of the earth at his estate, The Cabarette. Auchere told reporters that the ransacking, believed to be the work of vandals, has cost him at least $13,000…

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