White Wine Gets Ugly

One of the revelations that comes from making your own wine is discovering that white wines, which end up brilliantly clear, delicate and refreshing, and usually clean as a whistle, start off looking really disgusting. Glass carboys, the home wine staple, provide a clear window into the unappetizing visuals of fermentation; commercial tanks obscure the workings, which is probably good for morale among commercial winemakers.

Exhibit A is a row of carboys full of Sauvignon Blanc juice, frozen after the 2009 harvest and thawed on my patio about two weeks ago. Even though this juice was "clarified" before freezing, it still contains enough solids that it looks more like unfiltered apple juice than wine. Two of them, actually, look more like weak coffee, not a color anybody wants in their wine. (Those two came from Napa; the more presentable carboys from the Columbia Gorge.)

Compared to crushed red grapes, there's nothing very come-hither about this stuff. A few days later, in the heat of fermentation, it gets worse, much worse:

Fermenting white wines remind me of pea soup, or more precisely, pea soup coughed back up by someone with whom it did not agree. Plus, there's a dirty, beer-like foam on top. Mmmmmm-good!

Notice, however, that the regional difference in color has pretty well disappeared, making the entire lineup equally unattractive.

If there's one thing worse to look at than fermenting white wine, it's fermenting pink wine:

Don't you wish you had some of this stuff on your patio?