Finally the fruit is coming in! The vineyard crew starts picking at 3am and finish around 8am to ensure the grapes are cool when they come into the winery. We try to have all the fruit in the winery by 9am. Otherwise it can get too hot, and hot fruit (from being in the sun) is usually in worse condition than cool fruit.
Clusters are picked in small bins to prevent premature crushing from their own weight. One pallet usually has 42 blue boxes, about 0.7tons.
The small blue boxes are dumped onto a sorting table and a crew of at least 6 people separate out the poor quality fruit. Along with leaves and insects and twigs and all kinds of stuff you dont want in your wine.
The next step separates the grapes from the rachis. We only want pure berries in the tanks because the rachis give unripe, woody character to the wine.
We also sort out dried (raisins) and broken berries because they also do not contribute the flavors we desire.
In the lab, we collect berry samples of the incoming fruit for analysis.
We weigh a sample of 100 berries, then mash them up to analyze the sugar and acid contents. Knowing the weight of the berries at harvest helps us estimate yields in the vineyards. Knowing yields helps us plan picking crews (how many people do we need) and tank space (how many tons are we expecting).
Then tanks are filled and quickly inoculated with yeast. Notice the lack of color in the juice.
Color comes from longer skin contact. This juice has only had a few hours of skin contact.
Here the dry yeast is being rehydrated with hot water. It starts at 110F and before we can pitch it into the tank, we use juice to gradually cool it to within 20 degrees of the temperature of the tank, which is typically at 55F.
Frothy bubbles are a good sign that the yeast are active and ready.
The next day the tank is pumped over to maximize skin contact and aerate wine for healthy yeast.
And we are off and running.
-L
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