Wine 201: The Sun

This one is for my nerds

Let’s get the party started.

It took me a while to finally begin this series because I initially couldn’t figure out what direction I wanted to take it. Ultimately, I decided I want to touch on what makes wines taste the way they do first, and so figured we have to start from the ground up, literally. We’ll begin with what wines are made from, the grapes themselves.

Nerds rejoice: it’s about to get granular.

So the sun.

We all took basic biology. Besides the indispensable fact that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, high school also taught us the life changing knowledge that plants need the sun for photosynthesis, a process they depend on to create fuel for themselves. I guess sure, we kind of need vines to be alive, but the sun is much more than that when the grapes come into the picture.

I will be breaking down the sun into three parts: amount, angle, and direction of the sunlight the vines receive.

Important note: all these would in the end be site-specific with other multiple factors (we will get to those separately) affecting the grapes, so approach this as more of a theoretical concept with the goal to eventually help us understand grapes and wines as a whole. Also, these would refer to traditional viticulture historically, so disregard the exact effects of climate change for now.

Amount

It doesn’t take a genius to remember that fruits need warmth and the sun to ripen. Flowers bud in the spring after a long dormancy period during winter then start producing fruits in spring, ripen said fruits during summer time, and the bunches are finally harvested as autumn rolls around.

Where it can get annoyingly technical is when we start throwing in terms and concepts like how tartaric and malic acids decrease while sugars and anthocyanins increase as grapes reach veraison and continue ripening. So what the hell does that mean? How are all these related to the glorious adult grape juice we want to drink?

It’s actually quite simple. We bite into an underripe fruit, and it’s tart. We bite into a ripe one, and it’s sweet. So as the sun acts on the fruits, it essentially looks like the following:

So the more sun, more ripeness, more sugar, thus more flavor and more aromatic. Cool. But here’s the thing, we can’t simply have super ripe grapes—they don’t necessarily make the best wines. Take a bite of that imaginary fruit again. I don’t know about you, but I like that perfect balance between just tart and just ripe. The state and characteristics of the grapes obviously directly affect those of wines, so we need a balance of the two factors, acid and sugar.

The acids and sugars in the grapes are inversely related, and would look something like this:

We get we need the right amount of sun for the perfect balance of tart (acidity) and sweetness (sugar) when grapes ripen. But we also have to think about how the way the sunlight reaches the vines affect them.

Angle

When the light hits a surface at an angle, the same amount of light spreads out, which makes it less intense. The more direct aka perpendicular to the surface it is, the more focused and intense the light. Try it with your phone flashlight; you will see it immediately.