|
RCGI Home Page
Current Salon Home Page
Spring Equinox 2006 Salon Home Page
Beautiful Mother, Immense and Varied
Winds of Change
Wine Parables
Goddess Foot-note
Sacred Places, Sacred Journeys
Contributors
|
WINE PARABLES:
Planet Yeast
Bread and wine: the biblical staffs of life. I’ve made bread for decades, but until I started making wine, I didn’t realize the similarity between the two that now so obvious. Both start with an inert nutrient-rich substance—grain or grape—and both undergo an essential transformation under the influence of yeast. Without yeast, we would eat leaden cakes and drink grape juice. With yeast, we break bread and quaff wine.
These tiny fungi surround us, some wild, some domesticated. That’s the technical term for the useful yeasts we employ in bakery and winery: “domesticated.” Astonishing as it is to imagine convincing large horned animals to give us milk, taming invisible cellular beings seems an even more daunting task. Yet several millennia ago, when humans began to understand and cooperate with the appetite of yeast for sugar, the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae became our companion. Variations of this yeast make all our bread and wine today.
They do so by eating sugar and excreting carbon dioxide and alcohol. With bread, the carbon dioxide is what we want, because gas makes our bread rise. We bake the living yeast along with the flour they have been so happily munching on, while the alcohol evaporates in the heat. All life lives on other life and bread-baking, while it may seem a most peaceful task to us, would appear quite violent from a yeast cell’s point of view.
To make wine, we let carbon dioxide escape while we trap the alcohol that the yeast excreted. The first days after yeast goes into the opaque fermenting vat, the bread-like smell is almost overwhelming. Let lose in a sea of sugar, the cells eat and reproduce crazily. The little airlock valve makes a cheery burbling sound, hour after hour, as CO2 passes through. Then, after about a week, the sound quiets slowly, just as the bready smell disappears. The bubbles grow less frequent until, at last, silence.
When we open the fermenting container and test the wine’s specific gravity, our instruments show us that the heavy sugar is gone, replaced by light alcohol. And when we rack the wine into a glass carboy, we see the residue of frenetic feeding and dividing. A thick beige mat—the lees—covers the bottom of the vat. Yeast cells, dead, all dead. Unlike baking bread, making wine involves no holocaust. We just let the yeast cells commit group suicide. After eating up every available molecule of sugar, they starve. Those that don’t die from lack of food expire from the poison of their own alcoholic excretions. Their beautiful sugary planet, so rich it seemed inexhaustible, was not enough to sustain their orgy of excess.
|
