Dr. Flak looks just like you’d expect a Professor of chemistry to look like: a bit frumpy with geeky looking glasses and a shy, intelligent face. The material is dry. We start out with the chemical components of grape juice and move on to fermentation. The class clown, a short, stout restaurateur named Martin D. raises his hand, “So, Professor Flak, are you trying to tell us that we are going to be spending two years studying what is essentially a metabolic by-product of a one-celled organism?” Everyone laughs, including Dr. Flak and from this point on during his lecture, his own dry humor peeks through and keeps us amused.

After covering alcoholic and malolactic fermentation we move on to components of wine and the treatment and stabilization of must and wine during the production as well as the chemical analysis of must and wine. Professor Flack does a fine job of explaining, but I am the type of learner that need a bit of hands-on experience before something like this really sinks in. We are assured though that the only conditions and formulas we really need to know are those for photosynthesis, malolactic fermentation, and alcoholic fermentation. We should also know the acceptable chemical parameters of quality wines. Most important is to know the various treatments of wine, how they work and the reasons for applying them.

The language makes this sector a bit more challenging for me. Although my German is good and my vocabulary in normal circumstances sufficient, I have not yet had the need to use many chemical terms. In German one does not typically use the Greek names for the elements, but rather a Germanic name. Oxygen is Sauerstoff; Nitrogen is Stickstoff and so on. In English we tend to use the chemical names for the wine faults, which makes learning their sources fairly easy to commit to memory. In German there are some rather puzzling names for wine faults --- take “Boeckser” for example, which would make one think of a billy goat and is the German word for a sulfide fault. Hmmm… goats do roam and I wonder if the Fairview winery in South Africa are completely aware of the connotations. ;-)

I am certainly glad that I came prepared for this seminar. It appears that all of the Austrian Wine Academy lectures are based on the presumption that one has already read the basic script and hopefully some other material as well. The lecturers, in any case, take you beyond the rather basic seminar material and if this is unfamiliar, it is unlikely that you will get as much as you could out of the seminars offered.