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.

The sticky

Every winemaker will tell you the same thing: great wine is made in the vineyard. You cannot make great wine out of bad grapes, simply put. This is a basic truism of winemaking, and it is the reason why many winemakers spend more time out in the vineyard than in the winery. I mentioned before the special love many winemakers have for Pinot Noir. This is in part because it is a grape which vividly reflects the vineyard and land (aka terroir) that produced it. So a lover of Pinot, like Adrian Baker, takes great care to preserve that vineyard character in his Pinot Noirs.

But sometimes, especially when one is often engaged in such subtle winemaking, a more interactive approach can just be fun. So Adrian has been having some fun with a bit or Riesling. The grapes were solid but lacked that special something in their inherent vineyard character. WineMAKING was necessary to turn this into a great wine. So the approach was to leave the grapes out on the vine longer into the season and ripen them to the point of sticky sweetness. Accompanying this ripening is a vineyard issue called "Botrytus Bunch Rot." I say issue to maintain ambiguity, because in spite of being a rot, it is not universally detrimental to your grapes and wine. If it is the right kind of Botrytus, it does not detract from the wine quality, in fact it contributes a honey and floral aroma which is quite lovely. Botrycized wines can be very expensive and very good. This Riesling was picked with partial Botrytus, perhaps 30% infection, but it was the best kind of infection: a dry rot. This means that the rot is growing in a reserved clean sort of manner, with clean neat clusters, rather than a mess of broken wet berries as can happen (and which is the bad kind of Botrytus). So the grapes were looking promising when they came in the other day.

We layered the grapes into a large bin, filling the bin halfway. We then hopped into the bin and stomped them with our feet. I wish I could say we were barefoot, but actually we were wearing sanitized rubber boots (the modern world and heath standards can be a real bummer sometimes). In any case I had the opportunity to dance a jig, stomping the grapes with my feet. Then we added acid (to balance the taste of the wine, which will be quite sweet and will need good acidity to balance it out), sulfur dioxide (to keep the grapes from spoiling), extraction enzymes (to increase the release of juice from the grapes), and dry ice (to protect the wine in the short term). Then the grapes were left overnight, to extract some phenolics (for weight and mouthfeel) and aroma (that special honeyed Botrytus character I spoke of earlier) in the soak. The next day we took the bins and filled up a small press with them. We then put them through an incredibly long, gentle press cycle. This way, the juice was collected in a manner ensuring that the quality was high, and that the Botrytus character (which was largely dry, and therefore difficult to extract as juice during a shorter pressing) was intense. It was interesting to taste the juice over the course of the press cycle. Early on, the juice was only a little sweet, fresh, but with some Botrytus character. With time, the juice was sweeter, and picked up a darker denser aroma, like a wild honey or oxidized pear. The different levels of the pressings were separated into two tanks, the sticky stuff and the really really sticky sweet stuff.

It's fun stuff, this type of wine work, because it diverts from the usual minimalistic path of winemaking, while still maintaining the highest integrity of natural processes. It is a matter of the winemaker utilizing the tools at his disposal to get the best wine possible, with the assistance of Botrytus and yeast.

The last of the red grapes

The red grapes are finished! The last of the Pinot came in from Martinborough this last weekend, and they passed along the sorting table with little fanfare except for a few hoops of happiness to not have to sort anymore. While it's understood by all that our sorting goes a long way towards ensuring the quality of the wine by taking out anything unsavory (disease, leaves, etc), it's still not any fun. But as long as I'm on the subject, I'll show a bit of what we sort out.



So I've told you all a bit about pumpovers and punchdowns, but I'm not sure I expressed how tough punchdowns can be. You are basically taking a 2-meter long pole with a plate on the end (all stainless steel), and using that to mix 8 tons of fruit. Oh, did I mention that the fruit, once it is fermenting, forms a incredible solid layer of skins on the top of the tank called a cap? And that therefore, to mix the tank, you have to break through the cap? Then move over a bit, and break through the cap over there, and so on, until all of the cap is broken up? It's a damn good workout. Depending on the form you use, it works out your arms and shoulders and back a lot, your chest a bit, and your legs considerable (largely from having to balance on the edge of the tank, while you are moving around your plunger).


Another job that can be an amazing workout is the "digout." It's a part of the greater operation called a "drain and press." When a tank has finished fermenting, the juice which is at the bottom of the tank (below the cap) is drained into a bin, from which it is pumped into a clean tank. When the juice is all drained out, and you are left with just skin and seeds, the dig-out portion begins. You open the door and shovel out just enough grapes to be able to see light come through from the top of the tank. You then stick a fan at the top, so that it is blowing fresh air into the tank. You do this because a fermenting tank of grapes produces a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) which has a nasty habit of killing people who breathe too much of it. So we air out the tank lest we fall victim, and once it's safe, we drop into the tank like winemaking paratroopers armed only with shovels. And we dig that sucker out. One guy digs shovelful over shovelful out of the tank and into bins, and the second guy uses a forklift truck to bring the bins over to the press (where a special machine tips them into the press). Once the tank is completely dug out, and all of the grapes are in the press, they are.....pressed! Thus, a drain, and press.

So today, we had a massive work order: to drain and press three tanks. We could have done the simple thing, and set up three independent drain-and-presses. But there were complications requiring some thought. Two of these draining tanks were to have half of their respective juices go into initial receiving tanks, and the rest of both tanks would go into a third tank. The third drain tank would also, in its entirety, go into this same third receiving tank. Since a tank has only two inlet valves, not all three tanks could go into the tank at the same time...unless we used a T pipe to feed two tanks into one line. But if we were going to bother doing that, why not just do a double T and have all three tanks go into the same tank? And the first two tanks that were being split up, just have a T at the receiving tank with two valves and just switch the flow direction when the tanks were sufficiently full? Confused yet?


It was, I must say, the most complicated and glorious setup ever seen by the world of wine. While I was certainly the accomplice in the creation and realization of this masterpiece, I have to give credit to its mastermind, Drew Pickering. Here are some pictures to show it off.

Well that's all for the moment, because as usual I am dog tired after a twelve hour shift. I'll finish the plot by saying that once we had drained and dug out these three tanks (I dug out two of them, quite a good workout), the press went well. We sqeezed it lightly to get the good press wine ("good wine" being very technical terminology), then squeezed it harder to get the last litle bit of bad press wine, which is actually still quite good but can be grippy and drying on the palate, and which is therefore kept separate. Keeping it in a separate barrel is kind of like putting a potentially sick person in quarantine and under observation until it can be ascertained that they aren't going to infect other people. The "bad wine" might end up being good after all, and it can be added back to a final blend, or if it really is bad, it might end up going with the lees filtered bad wine from my last blog.