Types of Wine - Dry Whites
It is possible and in rare instances it happens, that a dry white
wine is made from a red (or black) grape. The point is that all fresh
grape juice is white, or clear, and that the color of the wine is taken
from the skin of the grapes from which it is made. It follows then that
a white wine may be almost colorless, as are some moselles made in South
Australia, pale green-yellow as are the best of the rieslings from the
Barossa Valley, to the deep golden yellow, of some sauternes.
 In making white wines, the winemaker is careful to take the skins off
the wine, by pressing, as soon as possible after crushing, for the
longer he leaves them, the deeper will be the color of his wine. The dry
white wines generally need more careful attention in making than reds.
They are less stable, less robust. The winemaker must exercise the
greatest care and judgment as to when to pick his white wine grapes, for
imperfections in balance will tend to show up more readily in the
finished dry white than in the reds.
It is very easy to spoil a white wine in the making, and such is their
delicacy, compared with the reds, that many will not "travel" in bulk,
but must be bottled at the place of making and stabilized before being
shipped to market. In recent years, the winemakers have learnt to
eliminate one of the causes of spoilage in making their whites, namely
fermenting at too high temperatures. Cold water is piped through the
fermentation vats to keep the wine at about 68deg F. This considerably
lengthens the time of fermentation, but avoids any coarsening of the
wine. Because the juice of white wine grapes generally is lower in sugar
than that of the reds, the unassisted process of fermentation would
normally be shorter. When this process is slowed down by cooling, the
acids and other chemical components are subjected for a longer period to
the fermentation process. One effect of the slowing down of the
fermentation process is that the wine retains more "fruitiness" or
identity with the variety from which it is made.
A desirable feature of a dry white—or red—wine is that, in the process
of making it, the distinctive characteristics of the fruit should not be
lost. It should be possible, and is possible with a well made wine, to
eat a bunch of the ripe grapes from which it is made and to identify in
the new wine the same flavors. Wine making therefore, and particularly
dry wine making, is but the art (or science) of preserving the fruit.
(Another way to do it is by drying the fruit and the result is raisins,
sultanas, etc!) The end product of the winemaker is a beverage and an
incidental by-product is alcohol in the liquid, but it is still a
preserved form of the original fruit and there is no merit in producing
a product that has completely lost its identity with the original. It is
just more difficult to achieve this end result with a wine, and it is
more difficult to achieve it with a dry white wine than it is with a dry
red wine.
Most Australian white wines need less time to mature than do reds. This
may be because of their delicacy relative to the reds, because the juice
from which they are made contains small quantities of sugar and acids of
different qualities, due entirely to the biological varietal differences
of the fruit. It may be because they are less robust and in consequence
require more careful handling and are affected more easily by external
factors. Many new white wines today are not racked into wooden casks for
the first stage of maturation, but are run directly into stainless
steel, or wax lined containers Before bottling lest they make too much
and too overpowering character from the wood.
Most new white wines today are bottled towards the end of the year in
which they are made. Dry reds, on the other hand, may remain two or
three years in the cask. As with the dry reds, many Australian
winemakers today indicate by the shape of the bottle the style of the
wine it contains. A white in the short, sloping shouldered bottle, may
usually be taken to be a bigger, softer wine than that in the very long
tapering bottle, which usually is a more acid, lighter colored, not so
full bodied wine.
The customary, inaccurate distinction that is made in the way that
Australian claret is distinguished from Australian burgundy, is by the
use of the terms white burgundy for the full bodied wine in the sloping
bottle, and hock or riesling for the lighter wine in the Iong, tapered
bottle. The distinction for long the whites is no more valid than it is
for the reds, but the bottle shapes do give an indication of what to
expect of the wine in them. This is a useful, visually descriptive
practice that Australian winemakers would do well to develop. White Wine Grapes
The basic white wine grape grown in Australia today is the semillcn,
known in the Hunter River district, as the Hunter riesling. It produces
a light, not too full-bodied wine, but is frequently found in the
burgundy type bottle, particularly when it comes from the hotter
districts where it tends to develop more sugar than in cooler places.
The grapes from which Australian white wines are made, and synonyms for
some of them are:
Semillon: Hunter River Riesling, Riesling.
Banquette: Doradillo.
Frontignac: Muscat.
Gordo Blanco: Muscat, Muscatel, Gordo, Lexia.
Verdelho: Madeira.
White wine grapes which have no other names are:
Rhine riesling, claret riesling, pivot blanc, tokay, traminer, pedro
ximines. Madeira grown in South Australia is a different variety from
the verdelho, although in the Hunter River district the two names are
used for the verdelho grape.
It is clear from the list of white wine grapes that more varieties are
used than for making dry reds. In conformity with today's very desirable
trend by Australian winemakers to identify their wines by varietal
names, there is a very much larger range of dry whites on the market.
One big Australian winemaker today markets 31 different dry whites! And
a great deal of pleasure and much education can be derived from the
gradual discovery of the differences.
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