whin.es weekly

Right, I tried not to, but you asked. Well, probably not you, but someone did. What you say? Another WSET update! Whoo!

A treat. Two treats because it's a bit bloody geeky and you might learn something.

This week was the last 'actual learning' lesson, we were looking at, hold your breath, bubbly wine, sweet wines, fortified wine and spirits. No actual, real, proper wine, the red stuff, but actually they are (apart from spirits) wines. Crazy. And before you ask, Johnny Swallow was, indeed, swallowing and gulping and finishing off whatever he poured, I'd assume about a bottle of wine, but this week a damn good mix of things.

We kicked off with a whip through spirits and distillation and that was actually interesting. You know you can distill pretty much anything that can be fermented and make a spirit? (and, unlike making wine or beer at home, a home-distilled spirits are illegal without a license!). Grapes, grains, fruits, vegetables, all sorts of things. Also, the distillation process is pretty cool too, you heat a fermented liquid, the alcohol boils before the water, then it evaporates, then you condence that and what condences is a high alcohol, colourless spirit. Brilliantly complex and it depends on what liquid you distill as to what it ends up as. Distilled wine = brandy, distilled beer = whisky, distilled cider = calvados, distilled blue agave = tequila, distilled anything = vodka. (essentially...).

After this, liqueurs, which are basically any spirit with added sugar and flavouring and a lower alcohol content. Simple. So the difference between a cherry brandy and kirsch is? Cherry brandy is a liqueur based on brandy with added cherry juice and sugar, around 20% abv and a redish colour (from food colouring). Kirsch is a cherry based spirit made by distilling fermented cherries and is colourless and about 40% abv. Got it.

Right, fizzy wine is brilliant, made and fermented and bottled under pressure so when you pop the cork all the trapped carbon dioxide escapes and makes the wine bubbly. Yeah! Two different methods. Simple method, big stainless steel tanks and the tricky (bloody complicated and labour intensive) method with bottle fermentation. You get good ones and bad ones in both methods. Have a prosecco, dry and fresh made in the tank method, inexpensive and trendy or have a Champagne, rounded and yeasty and expensive, made the tricky way. It's your call, not mine.

Sweet wines. There's loads of ways to make a sweet wine. Honestly, loads. Early harvest, late harvest, noble rot (I'll explain that one), freezing, adding sweet stuff (but oh no, not sugar, that's not allowed). There's more, but it comes down to two things. Concentrate the sugar in the grapes and ferment normally, or mess about with fermentation. It's clever, basically, when the alcohol level during fermentation reaches 15% abv the fermentation stops. The yeast just sort of panics and dies. If you've got loads of sugar in the grapes then there's still loads of unconverted sugar (sugar turns to alcohol during fermentation...) and the wine tastes sweet. The other way is to take normal grapes and ferment a little bit, then tip in a load of (essentially) brandy to increase the abv and stop the fermentation, leaving loads of unfermented sugar. The noble rot thing is cool, it's a rot that attacks and lives on the grapes, you need a misty morning to encourage rot and then a warm afternoon to dry the grapes out on the vine, so there isn't much water in the grape and there is lots of sugar. Clever huh? Good rot, like the good bacteria in Activia and the blue mould in Stilton, it tastes good and makes luciously sweet wines in a natural way. Who the hell discovered that? (Just like milking cows???)

Sweet wine technically covers port as well, as that comes under then heading of 'messing about with fermentation'. Sherry is a whole other story, a bit tedious and it tastes horrid (in, like, my opinion...) so I'm going to skip sherry. But not port, port is lovely, if you follow me on twitter, you'll realise that I'm a port convert. Geek fact, they're not called port because they're from Portugal but because they were historically for shipping crews (seamen...) and readily available at port, for journeys. Port wine, from the port, as in ships, not the country.

To make port, they tip in a load of brandy during fermenting red wine and then age it a bit in a barrel and you've got a full bodied, oaky, nutty, sweet redness, called port. Some are young, some get aged for 10 years and some get aged for 30 years in the bottle. The 4 main styles are ruby (young), tawny (a blend of vintages and aged in barrels for 10-15 and then blended again to make a nutty, brown port), late bottled vintage (single vintage, aged in barrel for 5 years but ready to drink when bottled), vintage (single vintage (not every year) and aged in barrel for only a couple of years and then aged in bottle for unto 50 years). 2007 was an amazing year for vintage port but please don't drink one until 2017.

I've got a mock test to do as homework this week and it should be a doodle, and a real test next week, I'll keep you posted. The pass rate is 85% for a distinction and that's my target. Roll on Advanced in September...

I was going to keep the WSET update short and do another 'Your Questions Answered' post, but I'll save that for another week, if you've got any questions or anything you want my opinion on then tweet me @whinesblog or email me dan@whin.es. Actually, if you want to know pretty much anything wine related I'll have a look for you, I'm not as quick or as thorough as wikipedia but I'm much more interesting.