Intensity

The last week or two has been quite intense at the winery. As the warm weather looks to be coming to a close, the window for picking before winter (and bad weather) kick in is closing down; at the same time, many of the grapes are reaching optimal ripeness. Both of these aspects necessitate picking quickly. And we are.

So on a given day, we often have two crushing setups running at the same time. This means there is someone tipping grapes onto a feeding hopper, which feeds to the sorting table, people sorting, then the grapes being destemmed and falling into a bin, which is then tipped into the tank in which it will ferment. I have done most of the jobs in this process: at one point, I might be driving the forklift, pulling bins of grapes out of the cold store room and tipping them, as well as tipping the bins of destemmed fruit into tank (and the stems into a rubbish hopper, which is put out in the vineyard and made into compost). At another point, I'll be sorting. Lat.er, when we are finished, I'll inoculate the tank (inoculate meaning to raise up a small bucket of thriving healthy yeast which are then added to the tank, where they can begin to gobble up all the sugars in the juice and make wine). And, of course, there is always tons of cleaning to do, which everyone helps out with.

At the same time as all of this crushing of red grapes, there is ongoing harvest and pressing of white grapes, such as Sauvignon blanc. This is often received in a machine-harvested form, which means there are no stems to deal with (since the harvester shakes the vine, making the grapes fall off the vine without the stems). The grapes (and some juice) are put into the press directly. The press is set to a program which increases the inflated pressure of a plastic bladder pressing against the grapes, gentling squeezing out the juice. This juice is then transferred to a tank, where it is cooled down and allowed to settle out. As the rough solids that may remain are not preferred in the final wine (or fermenting juice), we get them separated early. To do this we "rack," or transfer the clear juice off of the settled lees. The good juice is put in a new tank and inoculated to ferment. The leftover lees are not wasted, though. They are put through a special filter called a rotating drum vacuum, which can separate out the true solids, which are really only about 15% of the volume. The rest is perfectly fine juice. But just to be safe, we taste it and ensure that it is of high quality before it is recombined with the rest of the juice; otherwise it will be dealt with separately.

So this week, we finished off everything coming from Gimlet Gravels, our home vineyard which surrounds the winery. This was a major milestone, as GG contains Bordeaux varietals and Syrah comprising much of our total volume. We toasted at dinner to this and to the departure or Rosie, one of the interns, who was returning to England for work. But we will continue on with work, and this week should finish off the last of the red grapes, with the remainder of the Martinborough Pinot coming in. Next week, we will finish off the last of the whites with Sauvignon blanc from Martinborough. Then we will be done with harvesting! But no fear, there will still be plenty to do, with all of the ferments requiring careful management and finishing fermentation.