Wine Education: Part 1

Lesson of the day: Protein Stabilization.

This is what I like to think of as the pinch-pot process of wine. Wine makers claim that they are doing necessary work when they pull out the buckets of bentonite, but I know that they are just using it as an excuse to play around with a lot of clay. I mean, I would.

When mom and I were in Nepal, about to step into the Mustang Kingdom and bid wine farewell for the long, forsee-able future, we went into a last outpost and found 5 bottles of wine. Knowing that we were going to be far removed from such comforts for the remainder of our trek, we were ecstatic. The bottles had clearly been there a while and had been severely neglected in terms of upkeep, being kept in direct sunlight-- but beggars can't be choosers. Ready to buy the whole lot, we then took a closer look at the white wine to find that there were gossamer, white clouds floating throughout. Lucky for us we were in the mood for red.

What I hadn't realized at the time was that what I took as the wine "gone bad" was simply a case of no clay tottering for the winemaker. The whole process of protein stabilization is for nothing more than aesthetics-- it does nothing for the wine, (actually making the wine worse by tinkering with it,) except for keeping it nice and clear, like we like it.

For a bit of nerdiness because, well, I'm a nerd, the chemical process is pretty cool. The

clay itself is Bentonite which is more or less the clay that we liked to play with in elementary school. The same reason we liked to play with it-- it was infinitely malleable and stretchable and could make some pretty size-able pizzas-- is the same reason it is the perfect substance for this process. Bentonite has a huge surface area that can be used to filter through a whole tank of wine. The proteins in the wine, like proteins in eggs, get white when you cook them. These are positively charged and in order to remove these cloudy, white-hue producers, you have to use a negative charge. The negative charge of the bentonite, then, uses it's polarized charge to attract these positively charged proteins and, with it's big surface area, to catch the proteins as it drifts through the tank. So, in the end, Bentonite becomes like a huge net that is stretched across the top of the wine and pulled all the way to the bottom, collecting positively charged proteins in its web all along the way.

So yes, clay has been used in making your wine, but, rest assured, after it sinks to the bottom, the wine is taken off the clay residue. If you pick up on a clay character the next time you are drinking wine, sorry for that, but it probably wasn't from protein stabilization.