90

Percentage of wineries that produce fewer than 5,000 cases of wine a year. Despite massive growth over the past 20 years, Washington remains a tight-knit, family-oriented wine community. Several of the pioneering wineries of modern Washington are still run by the families who founded them, in some cases, with sons, daughters, and grandchildren still at the helm.

Carbonic maceration is a process that is widely practiced in which French winemaking region?

A. Provence

B. Burgundy

C. Alsace

D. Beaujolais

The wine Beaujolais (the region of the same name in France) is made using carbonic maceration. The process enhances fruity aromas and fruity flavors in the wine. This, along with gamay grapes, gives Beaujolais its distinctive and expressive fruitiness. During this process, entire clusters of grapes (often hand-harvested so that the clusters are rot-free and perfectly intact) are put whole into the fermenting tank. The grapes on the bottom, crushed by the weight of the grapes on top, release their juices, which immediately starts fermenting naturally due to wild yeasts on the grape skins, bathing the grapes on top in carbonic dioxide gas (a by-product of fermentation). Those top-layer grapes eventually explode from the pressure of CO₂, exposing them to yeasts in the tank and thus causing them to ferment as well. Carbonic maceration could theoretically be used with any grape, but it is particularly successful with ultra-fruity grapes like gamay.

“Perhaps the nearest I come to gluttony is with wine. As often as possible, when a really beautiful bottle is before me, I drink all of it I can, even when I know that I have had more than I want physically. That is gluttonous.
But I think to myself, when again will I have this taste upon my tongue? Where else in the world is there just such a wine as this, with just this bouquet, at just this heat, in just this crystal cup? And when again will I be alive to it as I am this very minute, sitting here on the green hillside above the sea, or here in this dim, murmuring, richly odorous restaurant, or here in this fisherman’s café on the wharf? More, more I think—all of it to the last exquisite drop, for there is no satiety for me, nor ever has been in such drinking.”

**—M.F.K. Fischer, An Alphabet for Gourmets, 1949.
Fisher lived in the Sonoma Valley for much of her life.**

90

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