Prenzel Wine Vinegar

Exerpt from:

A cook's tour of New Zealand
By Peta Mathias

Vinegar

Anyone can make vinegar and still more anyone can make flavoured vinegars, but only one outfit in New Zealand can make proper aged vinegar according to the French 'Orléans' method. Most modern vinegars are manufactured over a few days in stainless-steel vessels. These have built-in oxygen delivery and temperature-controlled systems. This is the fastest and cheapest way to make vinegar.

Prenzel, however, do things the slow way, producing an infinitely better product. They fill some oak barrels with Marlborough sauvignon blanc wine and some with cabernet sauvignon wine, then seed them with an acetobacter or vinegar 'mother'. The barrels are put in an insulated shed - which contains up to five barrels kept at 30°C.

The idea is to increase oxygen supply, so that the barrels lie on their side and each one is only half full. A hole is left in the barrel so that the air can flow over the surface. After three or four years all the alcohol has gone, then the liquid is diluted with water to bring the acetic acid level down from around seven per cent to five per cent.

The vinegar is then filtered to get rid of the mother but not pasteurised as this changes the flavour.
This is the Orléans method. It is wasteful, as some of the wine is lost through evaporation - 'the angel's share'.

It is also expensive, as a considerable amount of storage and labour is involved.

But the result is incomparable to the forcing tanks of industrial vinegars. Prenzel vinegar tastes as it did to the medieval palate, with a wide range of layered flavours and subtleties. No attempt is made to sugar or otherwise soften the product - it is just pure vinegar with no chemical additives of any kind.

Click here to purchase Prenzel Wine Vinegars.

Click here for recipes.