Though we have been watching Hill Country wineries for only a few months, we find ourselves already facing a small watershed. It is time to decide what makes a winery. We approach this task with only our own purposes and perspectives in mind; we are defining only that which interests us and that which we believe will interest our followers. Your definition may be more narrow or broad than ours.
We begin here: Holding a winery license is not enough. It is possible to obtain the necessary federal and state licenses and, say, import private-labeled bottles from Lithuania. Or you might elect to make and sell wine exclusively from fermented prickly pear cactus. You might mix your wine in used 55-gallon drums. Legally, you're a winery, but we will politely decline to pay you note.
Legalities aside, we can easily identify one defining characteristic: a winery must make and sell wine from grapes. A winery might make and sell fruit wines, too, but grape wine should be the core business. Because we said so.
Must a winery have a vineyard? We think not. Wineries and vineyards are separate businesses. Many great wineries grow only an inconsequential amount of their grapes. Many great vineyards do not make a drop of wine. A vineyard cascading down a hillside is a fine aesthetic touch, and it demonstrates a heightened commitment to the craft, but it is not a defining characteristic of a winery.
Do wineries have oak barrels for aging? Well, we hope so, but we are reminded of the time when we treated plastic cutting boards as heresy. Things change. Oak needs to be involved in certain wines, but why must it come from a barrel? The high priests of French wine (okay, French table wine) are using oak slats attached to the insides of stainless-steel fermenting tanks. The slats are toasted exactly like a barrel stave, and are made of the same wood. If the taste comes out properly, what's the difference? Is the geometry of the oak really that important? But there begins a slippery slope. We get queasy around oak chips. It reminds us of making smoked brisket, not wine. And if we accept chips in the bottom of a tank, swirled now and then for exposure, are we going to embrace little bags of oak sawdust? How about a shot of Liquid Smoke? It's a spectrum, with no clear line of distinction. We have pushed our definition as far as sophisticated slat systems, and will judge slat-wine by its taste. It will be a while before we venture further.
What about chilled fermentation? If you want a felicitous white wine, chilled fermentation is the way to go. It slows the bugs down and keeps the wine crisp, light, and fresh. It is also expensive. We are inclined to treat chilled fermenters as a quality distinction, not an essential. The better wineries make better white wines with chilled fermentation. Good wineries can make good whites without.
It is possible to make wine from grapes, or from grape juice ("must"). For a winery, as opposed to a basement vintner, the must should be just as it was crushed, with skins and pulp included in the reds. Many good wineries use some amount of must in their process. But must comes in different forms. It may be fresh, from a crusher down the road a bit. It may be hauled in from a couple of hundred miles away. It may be flash-pasteurized and shipped from California in drums. And it may be frozen and flown from Australia. Yes, frozen.
Pasteurized and frozen juices allow just-in-time fast-track wine making. Pour the juice in a small tank, ferment it for a month, age it for a month, put it in bottles and call it wine. That approach allows wines to be released any time of the year. If you're running low on 2008 Chardonnay, mix up another batch. There are "wineries" that buy Malbec juice in February and release the wine in May.
Texas does not grow enough grapes to supply its wineries. It is problemsome to truck in fresh grapes from great distances, because the fruit may begin to ferment during the journey, changing its sugar content unacceptably. Some Texas wineries work only with Texas grapes or Texas juice. Many more bring in juice. Whether that is good or bad depends on the details. One important detail is whether the juice is fresh from harvest and crush, or whether it has been preserved and used out of season.
Beyond must, some wineries buy finished wines to mix into their blends. That has a certain off-putting ring to it. The clear suggestion is that the winery's own product didn't measure up, and they had to add something more palatable. Yes, it might be that a small winery didn't have the capacity to make all three varieties for their triple blend, but isn't that just a reason why they shouldn't have tried a triple?
Should we ban a winery for using must? No. Would we ban them for including outside wine? It depends. Probably not unless the percentage added was offensive. Those practices place wineries and wines on a spectrum from not-so-good to great. It is information that we want to know as we evaluate a winery and its product.
So what does define a winery? We've given that a lot of thought. The other day we read about a couple of guys in California who sold their winery for $40 million. They had started about a decade earlier with a few thousand dollars that they saved from waiting tables. When they began, their first purchases were a used crusher, a few used oak barrels, and a half-ton of Pinot Noir grapes. That defines a winery. Even taking away the oak barrels, that defines a winery. They never--even to the $40 million end--had more than a rented warehouse to work in, but they had a winery. Two guys, a crusher-destemmer and grapes. It's just that simple.
When you visit a winery, check out the winemaking facilities. You'll probably find the crusher-destemmer outside, in the back, near a loading dock. That's what you're looking for. Wineries take grapes, they crush them, and they turn them into wine. Along the way they may add some purchased must, and they might blend in some outside wine. They may ferment in stainless steel or plastic (or maybe a big, old-fashioned demi-john of glass or ceramic, but we doubt it). They may age in oak barrels, or in tanks, or in the bottle. Their product may range from mediocre to sublime. But they begin with grapes, and those grapes are the backbone of their wines. That's what makes a winery.
Now. That means some changes for us. Some wineries that we have covered--some that we liked in a way--do not measure up to that simple standard. They will be set aside, and we confess that the reason is that last week we visited a winery that featured jalapeño wine, raisin wine, and peach wine, that used chips for oak flavor, and that fermented its wine in six-gallon glass "carboys" (think water jug). They were pleasant folks, and they had very attractive cocktail napkins and decorative wine racks, but as a winery, not so much. When we left, we felt compelled to come up with some sort of standard. We distilled it down to this: A winery makes wine that is based on grapes that they crush themselves. Maybe some of their wines begin with someone else's juice, but in the back, out on the loading dock, they crush grapes every year.
