Teroldego Drain and Press

Happy New Year.

For all the time that I didn't update you think I would have been off doing something cool.  Like last year I was in South Africa riding ostriches and petting cheetahs.  But no, nothing cool.  I was just having a very lazy stay-cation and trying to keep warm.  Napa has been freezing.  

And not actually freezing because it doesn't snow here but every morning my car has frost and being from a tropical country and growing up in the temperate bay area, that's considered freezing to me.

So back to last September . . . . . 

 Time to Drain and Press the Teroldego.  This is the blackest fruit I have ever worked with.  Like squid ink.

 The goal of this day was to move the wine from the macro bin to the barrel on the blue rack.

 It took about 2 hours -ish to move the half ton bucket by bucket to the press.

 The macro bin was so deeply stained Todd and I weren't sure we were going to be able to get it to be white again, but we were going to worry about that later.

Here Todd is dumping the buckets from the macrobin into the press.  Since we fermented in a macro bin, we couldn't open a valve and collect the free run (like we did with the tank).  

So all the wine first passed through the press so we could use the slats to screen out the skins and seeds, but we still collected free run to put in barrel.  This picture was taken before we started up the press.

The wine was pressed out through the wooden slats with about 1.6psi of pressure from the inflated bladder inside the basket.

And then of course follows the dreaded clean up.  

Although, I must admit I really like how the skins cake up and you can almost remove large solid pieces.

The last part was to drain and press the merlot in tank.  Looking forward to sharing our clever set up for that.

-L