The language used in the wine world is extremely prone to include foreign words. This must have been accepted partly because it serves the feature of being the 'drink of the elite', which is associated with wine. The fact that wine has been banned in terms of production and consumption by a large segment of society for the last seven hundred years in the lands we live in, has prevented the formation of a wine dictionary that spread to the base of society. But the literate segment, which constituted one percent of the society (the elite of that period), managed to create an enormous wine lexicon in Ottoman, the elite language of that period.
But this is the subject of another series of articles, let's get back to the part about gravitation. After the Republic, legal restrictions were lifted, but it was not possible for wine to become a popular habit after this long dormant period. In this respect, wine has remained, relatively speaking, in the area of interest of the elite. French, which has permeated the language since the Tanzimat (social, legal and economic reforms) period, has easily found a place in the Turkish wine dictionary, as wine is directly associated with France.
After the introduction of the degeneration of our language, let's talk about gravity. I guess we all know what gravity means. Since Newton does not have a special place in the world of wine, it seems at first glance that it is not easy to understand how the awareness of gravity and its formula affects wine production. But the truth is not like that at all. Moreover, although no specific method is named, we know that gravity has been used instinctively in wine production for thousands of years. How?
Wine workshops have an important place among the archaeological remains both in Anatolia and in our eastern neighbors Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and their history dates back thousands of years. When you look at the functioning of these workshops, we see that the grape juice obtained from the stone pools where the grapes are placed to be crushed is collected in another pool located lower, and in some of them, this water is collected through a hole in the place where fermentation will take place or is collected in jars to be transported. In fact, our ancestors have used the power of gravity as a natural convenience of their own production for thousands of years.
In some of today's modern facilities, the production process is planned by taking gravity into account at the very beginning. Thanks to the use of scientific research in wine, some details in the processing process have begun to attract attention. One of these is the care to be taken when squeezing the grapes. They realized that stress does not only affect humans, but also grapes are affected by stress. For this purpose, instead of squeezing the grapes by using force, the method of opening tiny holes (that is, perforating) in the skin of the grapes and allowing the grape juice to slowly crush and flow out of the grapes with their own weight was preferred.
Especially in wineries established on slopes, architectural designs that use elevation difference are preferred. In this way, the grapes are transferred from the place where they enter the facility and are first processed, one step down, where they are collected after pressing, with the help of gravity, and from there, to the area where the fermentation tanks are located, and again one step down for filling and bottling, with the advantage provided by nature. It should not be difficult to understand that this also provides an advantage in energy use.
In summary, gravity is an option used by many wine producers as an auxiliary production technique that causes less damage to the grapes and provides savings. For this, it is necessary to create a production line from the very beginning that takes into account the conditions of the location of the facility.
