GERSTEL Solutions No. 7 (pdf; 1,86 MB)

GERSTEL Solutions Worldwide Report
profit rules the market and dictates taste;
science becomes the tool to help tailor the
wine to meet the trend. Slightly more black
currant flavor here, a little more freshness
there: Currently, fruity, moderately sparkling
wines are popular. These can be produced
by growing wine under cooler conditions
at higher elevations or by fermenting
the grape juice at lower temperatures.
Many wine growers consider wine design
that follows such market requirements
a potential problem. What limits should we
impose on wine design? The limits of most
in the industry were certainly crossed when
employees of a South African winery added
bell pepper flavor to the wine. To most wine
professionals, adulterating wine with flavors
foreign to the species is nothing short
of sacrilege. Some companies have contemplated
diluting strong red wines with water
since customers are less interested in wines
with high alcohol levels. In Geisenheim,
stricter rules apply concerning the limits
for designer wines. „If this trend continues,
we will approach a situation where only
synthetic mass products are available”, says
Klaus Schaller, head of the research institute.
The thought is clearly not appealing
to the seasoned oenologist.
A seasoned gut feeling
and intuition to hit that
special note
Then what is the noble art of wine making?
First of all, it requires expertise on the effects
of growing conditions, sunlight, and
soil quality, susceptibility to diseases, fungi
and pests. „When it comes to the really
important decisions, I use my gut feeling:
You cannot produce a good wine without
a healthy dose of creativity“, says Rowald
Hepp, who grows only Riesling in his
vineyard “Schloss Vollrads”, according to
the magazine ‘Capital’ among the top one
hundred in the world. „To create wine with
individual personality, you need to go beyond
science and call on your intuition“,
says Carlos Moro, a winegrower from
Spain.
For amateurs, the basics may be comprehensible:
Taste and flavor is controlled
by maturing the wine in a barrel under
the influence of yeast. The details of how
to influence the fermentation to provide
top wines, however, is still more of an art
than a science, understood only by master
wine makers, each with his or her well
kept secrets.
If wine growers are forced to conform
to mass market tastes, “the
growers and wine makers that thrive
on authenticity will not survive in the
long run”, warns Klaus Schaller.
Just a single evening spent in good
company sampling a wide variety of
wines served in proper glasses can
give you an impression of the word
“authentic”, and why it is worth preserving.
GERSTEL Olfactory Detector Port ODP
Visualizing odor intensities
Identifying flavor compounds or compounds that cause offodors
are tasks that quickly expose the limitations of standard
instruments and methods. The GERSTEL Olfactory Detector
Port (ODP) allows sensing of compounds by the human nose
as they elute from the column of a gas chromatograph, but
the most powerful means of identifying flavors, fragrances
and off-odors incorporates the addition of a mass spectrometer.
For this technique, the effluent is split as it leaves the
column so that it arrives simultaneously at the nose and the
mass spectrometer, providing both sensory and chemical
identification.
A voice recognition software package provides a detailed
“olfactogram” that includes odor intensity, retention
time and voice comments for compounds as they elute. All
data is stored with the Agilent ChemStation results and can
be presented in a number of different ways. Among these
are overlapping chromatograms and olfactograms and data
reports with descriptors, that help with data interpretation
and problem solving.
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GERSTEL Solutions Worldwide – May 2007