19: Spotlight on High Volume Inexpensive Red Wines
In this Spotlight on High Volume Inexpensive Red Wines, Chris talks us through the type of company making these high volume wines in complex marketplaces with co-ops and large merchants selling rather than an estate grown wine. Likely to be exported to a number of countries where taxes will vary and packaging localised meaning more complexity.
The ideal climate for these wines is warm, sunny & dry with very low climatic risks, such as frost. This means riper flavours in the grapes such as red fruits, black fruits and cooked or stewed fruit. Typical regions are California, South East Australia, South of France, Puglia and Sicily.
In the vineyard, irrigation is common to ensure plentiful supply of water, as is mechanisation, which requires flat vineyards that are trellised.
Producers often use winemaking techniques that produce low tannin wines to give the wine as much appeal as possible to the consumer: easy drinking, reliable, popular at a low cost, with good distribution are key factors to secure high level of volume sales.
We explore the use of oak chips and staves vs oak barrels and how this style of wine will often follow a protective (or anaerobic) winemaking process to keep the wine away from oxygen. We discuss pre-fermentation maceration and fermentation processes. Carbonic maceration produces fruitier styles but needs whole bunches and hand picking. Blending wines is a typical practice although, clearly, single varietal wines are commonly made in high volumes.
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