Blending Wines

One of the highly respected parts of the process of winemaking is blending. Many wine makers actually view blending as a highly evolved art form. Blending is basically mixing different wines together in order to create a final product that is superior in quality to each of the different components.

The most common form of blending involves blending two different grape varieties of wine. Blending has become such a highly popular practice that winemakers that grow their own grapes are growing multiple varieties of grapes in the same vineyard, order to create a blended field. This process commonly involves using one white and one red grape.

Other blends may be entirely made from the same grape, albeit with different fermentation containers. Each container has it’s own unique aspects, and produces it’s own unique flavor. Due to the difference in containers, the taste for each wine will be different, even though the grapes are the same. Some winemakers even go as far as using a wooden barrel fermenting container, and a stainless steel container.

Another method of blending wines is to use wines that are from different vintages. If you have been making your own wine for some time now, chances are that you have several bottles of wine in your cellar that were produced in different years. Blending some of these together can produce a wonderful new wine.

One should take note that not all wines lend themselves to blending as well as others. Pinot Noir and Red Zinfandel rarely see improvements from blending. Chardonnays are not particularly improved by blending. Some wines are too delicate to blend, such as a Gewürztraminer.

When done properly, blending can help to balance many aspects of the wines, such as flavor, tannins and acids. Blending can also improve the quality of wines, using wines that have a decent level of quality to begin with. Blending a good quality wine with a bad quality wine will not help to make the bad wine better, though. Typically, rather than the bad wine taking on the better qualities of the good wine, the good wine will take on the lesser qualities of the bad wine.

If you are new to blending, it is a good idea to start with just two wines. Many winemakers discover the benefits of blending when they taste a wine, and decide that it can be improved. Blending gives you the ability to take the characteristics of different wines and blend them together to create a much better flavor. While wineblending may seem complicated, even most novice winemakers can create a good blend.

The basic process of wine blending involves tasting, comparing, and testing with different ratios of wines until you find the final blend that you prefer. It is best to start blendind on an incremental basis, starting with small amounts of wine, and then making minor adjustments until you find a preffered blend. Taking notes is a very good idea as you go along; even if you just record how many millimeters of wine you use each blend, and the combined flavor. These notes can help you to be more consistent at making wines in the future, and to increase the provide more ideas for future blends. See Winemaking Journal.

Letting wines age correctly is a good idea also. This is common with younger red wines, where the flavors don’t all come out right away. Letting a blend age is another good idea, giving it time for the individual components to marry and achieve good flavor. Tasting a young blend might give you an inaccurate idea of the what the final blend will taste like; just as tasting a young red wine might you a false taste of the wine’s aged flavor.

Many winemakers find that blending wines soon after fermenting produces better results. Blending immediately after the fermentation process protects the wine from oxidation and gives the blended wines the opportunity to age together into a single wine rather then separately.