Kanwal
K Grover enlightens us on wines and
more...
"...to fill the cup
that clears today of past regrets and future years".
Nobody else could have said it, of
liquor, better than Omar Khayyam. Nothing seems to relax us more than a glass of
wine, after a stressful day.
Wine has an interesting
history.
Wine drinking started by 4000 BC. The earliest written account
of viticulture is found in the Old Testament of the 'Bible', where Noah planted
a vineyard and made wine. It came to Europe with the Greeks around 1600 BC, but
the foundation of viticulture in Western Europe is mainly due to the influence
of the Romans. In India, wine saw its golden period with the advent of the
Moghul rule.
There are two
varieties of grapes.
'Table grapes', which are suitable for eating, and
the 'vinifera' variety, that are suitable for wine making. To grow any of the
wine-producing variety is a complicated affair.
It is in the making of the wine
(known as vinification) that the differences between red, white, rose, sweet,
dry and sparkling wine are achieved.
Vinification is a
four-step process - crushing (consists of de-stemming, crushing and pressing the
grapes); fermentation (where the chemical change of sugar into alcohol takes
place with the help of yeasts), which has several options depending on the kind
of wine being made - dry, sparkling or sweet; ageing, maturing and clarifying,
where the pulp articles are allowed to settle and the clear wine is pumped into
another tank, and finally, the process of
filtering.
Wine gets its colour from
the grapes.
For red wine, the liquid is left to ferment with the skins
and it gradually draws out the colour from the colour molecules in the red grape
skin. White wine can also be made from white or red grapes. When red grapes are
used to make a white wine, the skins are separated before the grapes are pumped
into the fermentation process and thus no time is allowed for the extraction of
colour from the skin. Rose wine is also made from red grapes - the wine is left
with the skins for a shorter duration.
