Barbera Drain and Press

After a little over a week of twice daily punchdowns, the Barbera finished fermenting and it was time to drain and press off the skins and seeds. We were open to extended skin contact but we started to get busy at real work, and we wanted to use the tank again for the Merlot, so due to timing, we decided to drain and press.  Having to make that decision made my garage feel like a real winery where space and timing are serious considerations.

The set up: Tank, buckets to move the wine from the tank to the barrels, Brute for the heavy press.

Todd backed his truck into the back of my house and we tried to have as short a trip as possible from the tank to the press, then the press to the barrels.

After the miserable experience of pressing the white wine, we decided to upgrade and borrow a better press.  This looks like a basket press (because there is a basket) but instead of pushing down with a crank, there is a bladder inside.  So it's a basket-bladder press.

 Todd is inserting a metal pipe into the barrel.

The pipe is not quite the right size, but the funnel still fits on top.  If we had put the funnel directly on top of the barrel, every time we poured wine in, it would splash all over the place and pick up a lot of oxygen.  Having the metal pipe means the barrel fills from the bottom up and splashes less.  To be honest it probably didn't do much to counteract how aerative we have been with the wine already, but we had a metal pipe, so we used it.

The first step is to drain the tank.  This means opening the valve and seeing what wine just flows out, the "free run".  We put a screen to separate the free run from whatever skins and seeds made it out of the valve.

We used many different containers, buckets, tubs, etc.  Here you can see the free run collecting on the bottom of the plastic tub and skins and seeds on the circular screen.  We filled 2 barrels with our free run.  That took about 2 hours.

But the skins still had a lot of wine soaked up, so we needed to press them and wring out the remaining wine.

 Once the tank is drained you can open the door and shovel out what is left.

We let the tank drain a little longer. At this point it became dark so the quality of the pictures diminished significantly, my apologies.

 Check out all the seeds at the bottom.

Now is was time to 'Shovel Out' or 'Dig Out' the tank, this usually involves actual shovels.

Real digging out looks more like this.  This is me shoveling out a tank at my real job.  Actually, I used a rake, but shoveling has a better ring to it.

Anyway, this tank is tiny, there was no need for shovels or rakes, just hands - nature's rakes.
PS, it was really hard to take a picture with the left hand and rake with the right, so please excuse the lack of focus.

 And done!

 So now the tank was empty and the press was full.

 This press is holding the skins and seeds from 1 ton of grapes.  You can see the black bladder all deflated.  We are ready to start.

 The press hooks up to a regular garden hose and fills up the bladder with water.

As the bladder gets bigger, it pushes against the sides of the basket and the wine gets out through the slats and skins stay inside the basket.

 Here you can see the inflated bladder.

Once we squeezed out all the wine we could, we let the water out, deflated the bladder and started to clean up.  When we took the basket out, the skins had formed a nice solid wall.  Here Todd is breaking off large chunks to put in the trash.  It was pretty cool.  Made for fast clean up.

 Then we sprayed everything down.  The clean up was pretty fast, but not fast enough.  It was about 10:30pm when we finished.  About 4 hours over our expected end time.  I don't know why we keep grossly underestimating how long it will take, its not like we do this for a living.

Ahh, clean press.  Such a satisfying feeling.

Until we remembered we had to press the Teroldego.

Oh and the Merlot.

Why did we make so much wine this year!?

-L