Wines

Recently I was at a wine factory. I went there on an organised tour to see the wine making process.
I was surprised at the whole modern way of wine making.

The wine making I have seen involved people stamping over grapes in a large wooden trough. The juice is then collected and stored in wooden barrels. I saw this in some village which produced home made wines.
So when I went to the factory, I was surprised at the huge steel cylinders and pipes connected to them. There were flies all around, attracted by the smell of grapes. The smell was not very inviting, it was infact very repulsive. The smell of rotting fruit to be exact, which is what wine making is all about. I did not really expect the flies.

Then we went to the bottling plant, they have a machine which bottles at the rate of  1500 one litre bottles per hour. That is a lot of wine. Adjacent to the bottling plant is the wine cellar with the huge casks.
The wine cellar was in a quite place, apparently silence produces better wine, not to mention the spices in the wine and the wood the cask is made of.
There were lots of bottles in the racks, each from a different year, the oldest wine dating back to 1999. The bottles are stacked on top of each other. The way the wine bottles are shaped ensures that the neck of the bottles are slightly tilted toward the ground. This ensures that the wine always touches the cork stopper, again for better quality wine.

Then finally for some wine tasting, different types of wine. Some were like vinegar, some where sweet and a few tasted excellent. There was a wine which had a very good fragrance and well was intoxicating.
So I returned home with a couple of bottles of that one.

Now as I am writing this blog, I take a sip to make me write better......