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Italian vinification at Vintage Wines
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Saturday, 26 May, 2007, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Bosky Christopher, Mumbai
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the domestic market that has three dominant wine players (Chateau Indage, Grover Wines and Sula) and a dozen smaller players, Vintage Wines Pvt Ltd, makers of the Reveilo brand of wines has positioned itself well, with its Italian lineage, in the extremely premium segment in terms of taste, packaging and price.
Vintage has formed a technical collaboration with Enofly - leading wine consultants from Italy for winemaking know how. The group is responsible for setting up the winery and thereafter sending it's members for checking the progress of the vineyard, harvest of the grapes and finally during the vinification (making wine).
Vintage is a family-owned company where the vineyards and winery are managed by Yatin Patil and the sales & marketing by his wife, Kiran Patil from Mumbai. The company has set up a 32,000 sq ft state of the art winery at Niphad in the Pune-Nashik wine region.
Grape is the primary ingredient used in winemaking and 80% of the quality of wine can be attributed to good quality of grapes. All the wine varieties used for making of Reveilo wine are planted in-house.
Vintage follows a practice of focusing on quality rather than quantity. The yields are lowered to better the quality of grapes - the same is enforced by reducing the number of bunches per vine/tree. Thus, a calculated compromise is made between the demands of the bottomline (more wine, blander taste, greater income) and quality considerations (less wine, more intense flavours, but fewer bottles).
The grapes begin to over ripe at a slightly warm temperature. Hence, they are harvested at the right time, i.e. morning itself due to the cool temperature at that time - thus ensuring a natural control of temperature, rather than an artificial one.
The vineyards are located in close proximity to the winery. This is advantageous, as the freshness is maintained, thus ensuring a minimum time between harvesting and crushing.
All of the above processes are not strictly followed, where the other grape growers are concerned, as their focus lies primarily in maximising the yield, said Patil. Filtration is done at regular intervals to ensure clear wine, using a filter. Patil said the other wine producers have only 1-2 filtration processes whereas at Vintage, the same is done at least 3-4 times, all of which, contributes to pure and clear wine. Certain select wines are aged in European oaks/barrels - this process adds more flavour and taste to the wine (Reserves). Micro-filtration is used for micro-biological stabilisation.
The bottling process, which involves a lot of sub-processes is a totally automatic and a hands free process at Vintage Wines, involving no human intervention, right from the time the bottles are set in the machine till the time they are corked, sealed and labeled. This automatic process goes a long way in preserving the quality of wine for a long time and minimises the possibility of errors.
It should be noted that the best of wines can be damaged at the time of bottling. According to Patil, most of the other wine producers use a manual bottling process.
The entire machinery used in the wine making process (destemmer, press, storage tanks, filter) is imported from Velo S.p.a. - world's leading wine equipment manufacturer from Italy. The other equipment like the micro-filtration and barrels, corks, bottles are also imported. The bottling line (mentioned above) is fully automatic with a washer, air remover, filler, corker and a labeler from the world's best bottling company from Italy - Bertolaso. Other wine producers import only a part of the entire equipment required, and use locally made equipment (storage tanks, bottles) for the remaining process, said Patil.
The entire winery is temperature controlled to ensure that wine at any stage is below 20 degree Celsius, which in turn, helps in preventing oxidation problems. Other wine producers pay attention to the temperature only at the time of storage of the wines in tanks, Patil added.
The company plans to launch its wine bar at the winery by Oct'07, and promote weekend trips (wine tours) for wine enthusiasts, thereby providing a detailed insight into winemaking.
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