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From a Chef's Perspective

From a Chef’s Perspective: Harvest Series Part I

September 18, 2015

These temperatures may be deceiving, but harvest is indeed here! We thought this would be a good time to break down the winemaking process for our readers. There is so much work that goes into making our wine, and a lot of the process is still unknown to most of our customers. One of the greatest perks of working at a small winery is we can satiate our curiosity quite easily- all we have to do is walk right into the vines, or peek into our facility (making sure not to get in anyones way). We hope that we can give you an intimate look into our process so you can better understand what you are drinking (and why some of our wines cost more than others).

We should start with the basics, which is picking & crushing. This sounds much simpler than it actually is, and the first part is quite tedious! There are two types of harvesting: mechanical and hand-harvesting. [To summarize mechanical- a big machine crawls along the path of the vines, shaking the bejesus out of the vines until all the grapes fall onto a hopper. The main benefit of this is that it is cheap, and fast. But- as with most things that are cheap and fast, you lose control and quality. Grapes get broken, they get wet, and some unsightly grapes make it into the mix along with some other unwanted debris.] We do not use machines to harvest our grapes- instead we have skilled workers hand-pick the grapes, one bunch at a time. This assures the best quality grapes are being chosen and the rest are left, well, for the birds. This requires a lot of hands, and a lot of hours- but results in the best possible pick of the seasons yield. And in case you were wondering what those yields mean for your bottle of wine…

1 bottle of wine is about 1,200 grapes
Now that price tag seems a little more reasonable, huh?

So now we’ve picked all those grapes, and they’ve been transported from the vineyard to the winery, and we have to crush ‘em. If you have been romanticizing this process in a vision of our staff stomping on grapes while getting drunk- we wish that were the case. This part is actually done by machines because it would take an obscene amount of time to crush grapes by foot- and the labor department would probably shut us down. Before we get into maceration- we have to clear something up- which is that although red and white wine grapes are different colors on the outside…

They are all the same on the inside! Just like people. (kumbaya.)

So, if red wine grapes (actually referred to in the biz as “black” grapes because they’re not really red) are white inside…how is the juice red? Essentially everything that we love about red wine (the ruby or purple colors, the tannins, the body, and the pronounced flavors) are all found in the flavor compounds and pigments of the skin! So, how do we get all that goodness into the juice? We wait. Literally.
We crush & press the grapes (making sure to not disturb the seed inside because that little sucker is really bitter) and then we let the juice and skins (this is called the “must“) hangout together for some time to extract those pigments and flavors. Depending on the time we wait, we get a rose pink (a matter of hours) , a perfect medium ruby, and if we wait a really long time we get a deep purple (sometimes over a week). We did a little experiment in-house to watch it happen and it worked quite well:

What we did here is a slightly different because our jar of juice stayed at room temperature for the most part. Maceration can either be done “cold” or the juice can be heated to speed up the process- this is up to the winemaker and each one has their own theory on which method is better. Once we have achieved the color we want, the juice is taken to the next step: which is fermentation.

Our tasting room specialist Julia King will be reporting on that next! Stay tuned…

Alicia Ekeler
Director of Tasting Rooms

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