Why does Beaujolais Taste Like Bubblegum?
A guide to Carbonic Maceration
What is Beaujolais?
Beaujolais is a subregion of Burgundy where light, quaffable wines are made with the red grape, Gamay. These are wines for aperitif, light fare, or an easy drink on a balmy summer night: generally carefree, fresh, and delicious.
Gamay contributes a lot to the character of these wines. The thin-skinned grape ripens early and is extremely acidic. The acidity is tempered from astringency to a pleasurable freshness as a result of two factors: The first being the acidic soils particular to Beaujolais’s unique terroir. The second is through a process called carbonic maceration.
Carbonic maceration draws out fresh strawberry and raspberry flavors, along with crushed flowers and a decadent, velvety texture. It also imparts a fruity, bubble-gum flavor and aroma that always helps me to identify this particular process in a wine.
The parallels are both striking and illuminating. The bubble-gum flavor is designed to evoke a kind of non-descript fruitiness that is at the essence of what makes Beaujolais so delicious. Both manifest a crafting of acids and sugars that yield a kind of weightlessness and ease that evokes not only a pleasant taste, but also something unencumbered and fun.
Carbonic Maceration
Carbonic maceration works like this: Picked grapes or full clusters are put into a fermenting vat (usually concrete or stainless steel). The vat is sealed and the oxygen is pushed out of the environment either by the carbon dioxide released at the beginning of fermentation (in crushed grapes at the bottom of the vat), or else by CO2 being manually pumped into the container.
In either case, you end up with a generally anaerobic environment (a space without oxygen), with the grape skins mostly intact. In the absence of oxygen, the enzymes in the living grapes start to break down sugars in an intracellular process of anaerobic respiration (respiration in the absence of oxygen). It happens to be that during anaerobic respiration, plant enzymes produce ethanol (alcohol).
Once the percentage of alcohol reaches between 2–4%, the enzymes die off, so there would never be enough alcohol produced to make wine by carbonic maceration alone. However, this chemical reaction is responsible for more than just the conversion of sugar into alcohol — in particular, the process breaks down malic acids.
The illustrative analogy is aerobic versus anaerobic respiration in human cells. If and when you find yourself running, you’ll likely experience a pain in your legs that’s emblematic of this very same reaction. In the absence of requisite oxygen, energy is burned anaerobically, converting malic acid into the lactic acid that causes a burning sensation.
The important difference is that plant cells convert malic acid into alcohol, not lactic acid. What the alcohol produced in intracellular respiration contributes to the flavor of a wine seems to be anybody’s guess, but the breaking down of malic acids is a familiar chemical process in winemaking that bears a lot on flavor.
Lots of wines go through a secondary fermentation called malolactic fermentation whereby a bacteria converts malic acids into lactic acids. Vintners let this happen to soften the sharp flavors of malic acid, but it comes at a price. A byproduct of the reaction is an organic substance called, diacetyl, which imparts a sometimes overwhelmingly buttery flavor you’ll taste in lots of richer Chardonnays.
Wines that go through carbonic maceration can avoid malolactic fermentation because anaerobic respiration does the job of breaking down malic acid without the production of lactic acid or the byproduct of diacetyl.
Furthermore, winemakers are able to retain some malic acidity. The malic acid present in Gamay is extremely important to the flavor profile of Beaujolais. It imparts a tart and appealingly sour flavor. Indeed, malic acids are regularly used in bubblegum for flavoring and to carry this tartness through the midpalate. Carbonic maceration allows for a milder tempering of this acidity than malolactic fermentation and helps to retain primary fruit flavors.
Reductive Winemaking
In Beaujolais, they harvest late. The hope is to get fruit that’s as ripe as possible. Ripeness being a kind of correctness condition, it is extremely important to do everything possible to retain this enigmatic property in the cellar.
Carbonic maceration is only possible in an anaerobic environment most proper to a style of winemaking called, reductive winemaking. This is a style contrasted to oxidative winemaking, where oxygen is present during fermentation. In just the same way that exposure to oxygen will turn an apple brown and dull the bright flavors, oxidative winemaking masks ripeness.
The risk that comes with reductive winemaking is the potential for fostering volatile compounds that will give you some really funky tasting notes like old cheese, burnt rubber or rancid peanut butter: bad stuff.
The People
As with many things in winemaking, it’s all about striking the right balance. Kermit Lynch’s Gang of Four Beaujolais producers are as emblematic as any for Beaujolais today. These are Jean Foillard, Marcel Lapierre, Guy Breton, and Jean-Paul Thevenet.
Each are followers of Jules Chauvet, a winemaker largely credited with inspiring the natural wine movement. In many ways, Beaujolais was the perfect home for the birth of this global trend. The fresh and unencumbered wines that result from natural winemaking practices are concurrent with the style of Beaujolais in general.
From Lynch’s website:
These rebels called for a return to the old practices of viticulture and vinification: starting with old vines, never using synthetic herbicides or pesticides, harvesting late, rigorously sorting to remove all but the healthiest grapes, adding minimal doses of sulfur dioxide or none at all, and refusing both chaptalization and filtration. These techniques allow the character of Morgon to express itself naturally, without any cosmetic surgery: rustic and spicy yet also refreshing and loaded with the minerality of the granitic vineyards.
Cool.
In addition to these commonalities, each domain practices carbonic maceration in various degrees, finding signature results. Both the estates of Marcel Lapierre and Jean Foillard use whole clusters of grapes for this process. What’s most important is how long they let this process go. The longer the juice macerates, the more the wine extracts compounds from the skins and stems.
At Lapierre’s domain, they let carbonic maceration go for 10–20 days. At Foulard’s, it’s 3–4 weeks. The difference in the resulting wine is stark. Lapierre’s wines are always a bit juicier, lighter and drink much younger –sometimes by years. Foillard’s wines darker fruited, fuller bodied and age very well.
But isn’t carbonic maceration supposed to retain freshness and tart, ripe fruit? Isn’t that why Beaujolais tastes like bubblegum? Wouldn’t that mean that the longer you carbonic, the more you’ll bring out these special features? What the heck?
True, carbonic maceration keeps wine light and juicy, but macerating wine in tannins and stems imparts some qualities of its own: structure, body, green-stem flavors, bitterness, a dry mouthfeel, etc. So it isn’t as though Foillard’s beaujolais is not fruit-forward or bubble-gummy, but rather that these flavors are couched in a more demonstrative structure.
In fact, lots of tasters seem to attriubte the bubble-gum (or – quite common – a bananna peel note) to maceration with the stems. It’s difficult to say precisely which tasting notes are grounded in what process, but all-things-being-equal comparisons are helpful. Tasting Beaujolais from great producers like Lapierre and Foulard (or even a producer like Michel Tete who destemms before vinifying) suggests that this bubble-gum fruitiness maps more reliably onto carbonic maceration than the prescnece of stems.
Is this fruitiness sometimes a little earthier or greener? Sure, but it seems that the very heart of what makes Beaujolais, Beaujolais draws a straight line to the process of carbonic maceration. Slightly enigmatic, likely transformative, its the kind of practice that suggests making a wine from a place includes a recognition of culture, tradition, philosophy, and pure wit. This is the case in Beaujolais, in no small part.
