Crafting Tomi Wines
Each year, the characteristics of the grape harvest differ.
Each year, the winemaking process poses a series of challenge singular in their difficulty and significance.
Each year's harvest of raw grapes provides the basic ingredients from which wine is made. Unlike beer and whiskey, which are brewed or distilled using grains, careful consideration of the vinification method based on the specific qualities of each year's harvest is an essential part of winemaking. This process accounts for the difficulty of making wine and ultimately imparts the real thrill. In the truest sense, it is an annual challenge singular in difficulty and significance.
This section introduces the process by which Tomi no Oka Winery's flagship Tomi Red is made.
Crushing and pressing
Tomi no Oka's highly experienced vintners meticulously select only the finest grapes for use as ingredients for this fine wine. They're careful to allow plenty of time for fermentation, a process during which fine-grained temperature management is critical. If the mixture gets too warm, the wine's fragrance will be lost; too cool, and workers will be unable to extract the necessary ingredients. During this critical period in the wine's creation, the fermenting liquid is kept under careful observation on a daily basis.
Fermentation
Maceration (a process of liquid circulation) is an essential part of fermentation. Maceration serves a variety of purposes, among them the supply of oxygen required for the growth of the yeast, the extraction of various ingredients from the skin and seeds of the grapes, and the limitation of the growth of microbe contaminants to ensure a healthy and robust wine. The process is accomplished by manually circulating the wine inside a tank while closely observing its qualities on a daily basis. There is no respite from this task?workers spend their weekends at the winery during this stage of the winemaking process.
Barrel and tank aging
Once the fermentation process is complete, fledgling wine is aged to further refine its flavor. At this stage, the choice of barrel is of key importance. Imagining the desired flavor for the wine being made, the vintner specifies such barrel properties as origin, capacity, and extent to which the wood is burned. Since Tomi utilizes grapes with a distinctive character that seems to concentrate the flavor of the original fruit, we usually utilize new barrels in an aging process that lasts just short of two years. In this way, we seek to impart a well-balanced, barrel-derived fragrance intense enough to complement the flavor of the fruit.
Because wine aged in new barrels tends to evaporate at a comparatively high rate, volume decreases more quickly than it would if used casks were employed. This reduction in volume means that more air is introduced into the barrels. Since air causes the wine to oxidize, workers replenish barrels with wine to replace volume lost to evaporation. This procedure is performed about twice a week during the first few weeks after the barrels are filled and then once a month once the rate of evaporation slows.
Racking is another important part of the aging process. In this step, the topmost, clear layer of wine in one barrel is siphoned off into another barrel. In addition to aiding in clarification by removing the lees/sediments that cause cloudiness, racking supplies the wine with the oxygen required for aging. The process is performed about four times a year. Since Tomi wines have high tannin content, workers add egg whites to the barrels one month before bottle aging to speed precipitation of the lees out of the wine. This technique has a mellowing effect on flavor.
Bottle aging
The timing with which the wine is removed from the barrel is based on human intuition. The wine's bouquet and flavor are closely evaluated. First, workers assess the characteristics of individual barrels. Next, they blend barrels in pursuit of the ultimate flavor. Then the wine is filtered and placed in bottles, marking the beginning of another period of aging that will last for a minimum of one year. At some point, the bottle will be shipped, but its contents will continue to age until the wine is uncorked. Flavor builds as time goes by.