An inevitability of making red wine is cap management.
Cap management is accomplished with punch downs and/or pump overs.
At this winery the clusters get destemmed to separate the berries from the rachis. This process already breaks up the berries a bit, but some go further and crush the berries to let the juice out. This is why a lot of place refer to this time of the year as Crush, as in Crush 2010.
But with white wine we press (not crush) the grapes and for our reds we just destem, so I call this time of year Harvest.
But with white wine we press (not crush) the grapes and for our reds we just destem, so I call this time of year Harvest.
The mostly intact berries go into a tank to ferment and eventually become wine. As the fermentation progresses and the berries are further broken up and they release their juice. In the tank the skins and the juice separate and the skins and seeds float to the top of the tank, where they create a cap. Since this cap floats on top of the liquid, it dries out. The skins and seeds are where the majority flavor and texture of wine come from. Our goal is to extract color and flavor from the skins, so we are constantly battling to keep the cap submerged and in contact with the fermenting juice. One way is to pump the wine from the bottom of the tank over to the top. This breaks up the cap by getting it wet and the skins mix back into the juice. Another way to accomplish this is to physically punch the cap back down into the liquid.
So far in the season we've only gotten small amounts of red grapes, too small to go into a tank, so we've put them into puncheons. Puncheons are donkey kong sized barrels. A regular barrel holds 60 gallons, a puncheons holds 132 gallons.
Oh yeah.
We use them to ferment small lots by taking the heads off, plugging the bung hole (yes that's the technical name) and standing them upright. Then, twice a day they get punched down until the fermentation is over. Every day (including Sundays, for about 2 weeks. This is actually pretty tough work in the beginning because the berries are not broken up and it's one solid mass. Here we only punch down a fermenting vessel twice a day, but at a previous winery T did punch downs 5 times a day. He got pretty yoked that Harvest. Or so he says. I wasn't there, so we'll have to take his word on it.
Here are T and A demonstrating the art of the punch down:
Today's Tunes: Flaming Lip's Embryonic (in preparation for tomorrow night's concert).
Up Next: T's Harvest Workout Plan
-L
I've officially become a follower of the blog now- wish I could hide the time of my post- I appreciate your use of BOLD and the visual of "T" as a kind of ripped "juicehead" punchdown monster. And as a card carrying sad sack, the Elliott Smith reference in the title does not go unappreciated.
ReplyDelete-B (and by B I mean Brendan, dude who worked at CL during bottling, for clarification purposes- get your crush on)
Hey BeeRenDan! We miss your face around the winery holmes! Yeah, he says gained mad pounds of muscle that harvest doing punchdowns five times a day for like 30 lots. Now he has a cush lab job and has let himself get flabby. But soon, we'll have a Harvest Workout Video, and maybe some Harvest Olympics! (Barrel rolling anyone?) You should come back for those. Also, the internet and I will pretend that your comment time stamp is such because you were still at work at midnight(like most of us).
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