Wine vs. Beer

One thing I enjoy about wine production is the long timeline. It allows you to take your leisure with the process and make micro-adjustments as you go. Add a touch of oak. Let the flavors mature. Take the wine off the lees and basically wait for it to reach the point you want it to.

Besides making wine, I also brew beer, which in comparison is a harried sprint. The two weeks of hustle that is the crush in wine making is roughly the same time frame for every batch of beer. The equivalent of racking in beer-brewing is secondary fermentation. Secondary fermentation is a one to two week process, though it can stretch out to over a month with high gravity beers. Compare this to the 6 month or more spent racking and aging wine and the difference is expansive.

The extra time gives you opportunities to ruminate on and appreciate the process. You can make small tweaks to the final production along the way. In beer brewing, the batch is going to do what it's going to do and there are few opportunities other than futzing with some early steps to alter the final product (short of fucking it up or changing the temperature). You basically have to make your changes in the next batch, which in beer could be next week, not next harvest.

The seasonal aspects of wine making is one of it's quirks. The craziness of harvest and crush; where there are several tasks that require daily attention. Punching down the fermenting must. Attending to the Brix readings and acid tests as the sugar turns into alcohol. The rush to get everything together for harvesting the fruit and crushing the wine at the right day and time. All this activity is double or triple the amount of effort that goes into a batch of beer. Crush's intense activity gives way to patience and letting nature take its course once the grapes have been squeezed. Then the slower pace sets in. Over the winter I've started to appreciate the longer perspective that this pace generates.

Here's to a few more months of watching an waiting broken up by the occasional tasting and racking. Heck I might even need to do a batch of imperial stout or belgiam trippel, so I get to take a similarly long term approach to my beer making.