HORT 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Pasteurization, New World Wine, Classification Of Wine
22 May 2016
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Document Summary
Winemaking has a history reaching back at least 6000 years. Winemaking is thought to have originated parallel to the domestication and use of vitis vinifera in the southern caucasus. Grapes normally have a naturally high yeast inoculum on the skins by maturity. The grape, unlike many of the other fruits gathered by our early agriculturalists, accumulates carbohydrates as soluble sugars. These single sugars are readily metabolized by yeasts. Most other fruits and vegetables store carbohydrates either as complex sugars or starches and pectin"s which need preliminary enzymatic cleavage before single sugars are available for fermentation. If wine is kept in vessels that exclude air, resistance to spoilage is retained over long periods of time. Aeschylus, plato, homer and socrates wrote a lot about wine during the height of the hellenistic period. Fascinated with wine because it was the drink of the gods. Viticulture and winemaking spread with the roman conquest of the rest of europe.
