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| We’re starting tonight with a charming, aromatic Hungarian sparkling wine that spends three years on its lees. What are lees, you might ask, and why is this a thing you should care about? Lees are the remnants of the yeasts that are responsible for creating carbon dioxide bubbles during secondary fermentation in the bottle. There’s no polite way of putting this, but after the yeasts consume all of the sugar in the bottle and produce the desired, fizzy effect, they die. But don’t fret: they died doing what they love, which is to give us pleasure. And after they die, the chitinous shell that protects yeasts while they’re alive fragments, dissolves, and eventually, the innards of the yeast cells leach out. This process is called autolysis, and you’ll sometimes hear one of us at the shop muttering approvingly about a wine’s autolytic character. Yes, part of the experience of good sparkling wine is both the fizz generated naturally by the yeasts while they live, but also, well, the texture and flavor of yeast guts. Please, do not send me a yeast and desist letter regarding this brutal truth.
Without yeast, we would have grape juice, but no wine: delicious grape juice, to be sure, but no wine. Yeasts are neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, but are microscopic fungi that can perform a number of wondrous transformations—turning gruel into bread or beer, and apples and grapes into cider and wine. Yeasts are ubiquitous in nature (don’t freak out, but you’re surely breathing in some as you read this note), especially in wineries in which winemakers practice wild yeast fermentation. With grapes, yeasts perform a chemical transformation that’s fundamental to wine: the yeasts consume the sugars of the grape and metabolize them into alcohol. But in addition to the chemical transformation, there’s also something akin to an alchemical transformation, in which yeasts take a base material, grape juice, and transmute it into something entirely different. If you’re lucky to taste fresh-pressed pinot noir juice, it tastes pretty much like any old grape juice, but once yeast does its job, the resulting wine diverges considerably from the juice out of which it is born. Yeasts (and to be fair, bacteria, too) create an array of organoleptically interesting compounds from precursors in grapes, compounds that are not in the raw juice, but only arise through fermentation. Take one compound: ketones, one of which is responsible for the aroma of raspberries, found, of course, in raspberries, but also, through the alchemy of yeasts, in certain wines, too. It’s easy to deride high-falutin’ wine tasting notes that mark raspberry flavors in a given wine, and consider such observations as products of imaginary, fanciful flights, but the truth is that some wines do have a pronounced raspberry ketone character, and it’s due to the same compound found in actual raspberries, here expressed through the actions of yeast. |