Drain and Press and Barrel down

As we continue to drain and press tanks, we must then put the pressed wine into barrels for aging, or elevage, as the French call it. The French term emphasizes the fact that the wine's quality is elevated during the barrel aging process. A young wine, fresh from the press, has a distinctly juicy, rough flavor. There are rough tannins, rough solids, bitterness and astringency, a strong smell of ethanol and other undesirable aromatics, and a smell which is mostly of wine, not a complicated bouquet of suble aromas. With time, some of the rough young juicy and ethanol smells will round into a nicer, subtler wine smell, and only time can do this. But another factor besides time is necessary to calm the tannins and smooth out the mouthfeel, as well as evolving the aromatics into a more aged style: oxygen. Oxygen is a very useful tool to help a wine develop, but you cannot simply slam the wine with large volumes of oxygen one day and say "there we go! It's delicious!" Like most things in wine, a subtle approach is necessary. Too much oxygen will create a plethora of faults in your wine, including the growth of acetic acid bacteria leading to the formation of acetic acid and ethyl acetate, in effect turning your wine into vinegar. Also, your wine would lose it's aromatic components, which would be oxidized and destroyed. These negative effects occur when too much oxygen reaches your wine. But when small amounts of oxygen enter your wine over long periods of time, a beneficial aging process occurs.

The best way to get small amounts of oxygen into your wine is by putting the wine in oak barrels. Oak has a porosity perfect for aging wine. It is dense enough to ensure that the wine will not leak out in fluid form, aka it will hold the wine. But it is porous enough that small amounts of oxygen can enter the wine from the surrounding air.

In recent years, wineries have experimented with other ways to get small amounts of oxygen into a wine over long periods of time. Micro-oxygenation is a technique in which minute volumes of oxygen are fed into a tank of wine via a compressed oxygen canister. This technique has become quite a fad, because it ages the wine quicker than barrels, but does not have the negative effects of over-oxygenation. Also, it negates the need for barrels, which are very expensive (a French oak barrel runs for over $1000 these days and the price is ever increasing). But this technique is mostly used for cheaper wines, whereas higher quality producers generally stick with the traditional, and pay whatever is necessary to obtain barrels for elevage.

All of which is to say, we're barreling down like mad men! Every day we put several tanks of wine into barrel, filling as many as 200 barrels in a given day. The barrels are retrieved from storage, where they have been storing last years wine. The 2009 Pinot Noir barrels would be emptied into a tank (from which it will be eventually bottled). These same barrels would then be cleaned, and the old and bad smelling barrels would be culled out of the lot. New unused barrels are then added to the lot, and these barrels would all now be filled with the 2010 Pinot Noir! It's a magical process really, involving a tangle of pumps, hoses, clamps, gaskets, valves and rods.

We are emptying tanks rapidly, and on the horizon the end can be seen. Harvest is definitely tailing off, and everyone is getting this weekend off, the first weekend since harvest kicked in full speed back in April.