Bins are tipped into a large hopper and moved  by conveyor belt  toward the crusher-destemmer. Passing by many busy hands, we toss out leaves, rocks, and any unripe or mold-damaged clusters. The Concept: “If you wouldn’t eat it we don’t make wine from it.” It takes just a small percentage of sour tasting clusters to effect the ultimate wine flavor, so we take this laborious step often bypassed by large producers in the name of efficiency.

A giant stainless cylinder rotates inside the destemmer where stems get separated from berries and discarded. Individual berries get fully crushed to release the delicious juice. Now called “must”, this mixture of  grape pulp, thick gooey juice and skins gets pumped into open-topped stainless steel vats for a 24-48 hour settling before fermentation is encouraged to begin.

Fermentation: What's happening?  When the yeast comes in contact with the sugary grape juice, it begins to feed on it, rapidly growing and reproducing. Enzymes within the yeast convert abundant sugar in the juice into roughly equal parts of alcohol and carbon dioxide and releases energy in the form of heat.

During fermentation wines are monitored   twice a day by hydrometer readings to determine how much sugar has converted to ethyl alcohol, a process that takes between 7-14 days. The must also has to be stirred, called “pushing down the cap,” because the skins will rise to the top and dry out, being lifted by the billions of carbon dioxide gas bubbles forming underneath.  This way the fermentation process remains consistent, like stirring a red sauce on the stove. Eventually all the sugar is consumed and fermentation is complete. Finally... you have wine - a bit raw at this point, but WINE!

The next step separates the solids from the  skins.  Called “pressing”, we use several pieces of equipment depending on the size of the lot.  Small amounts 5A water bladder basket press with wooden slats leave enough room for the wine to go through but not the skins. There is a bladder in the middle of the press that slowly fills with water and will eventually press the skins into a hard cake, which we remove when we have extracted all the wine from the must. We then pump the wine into our barrels for aging.

New wine is thin and tart and will get better with aging.  As the wine sits in the barrels some of the water will slowly evaporate through the pores in the wood barrels and needs to be replaced with more wine. This is how wine becomes concentrated, similar to simmering a sauce. Over time you have a concentrated liquid with flavors that have developed in the aging process.

What else makes up wine besides alcohol? It’s 83-85% water, 12-15% ethyl alcohol, with small amounts of Tartaric and Malic acids (keeps wine from spoiling), esters (that’s what you are smelling), tannins (in red wines what most people call the “dry” effect), and about 300 other minor components.

When the wine is ready for consumption it is time to bottle it. Bottling is done not just to transport and sell it, it is done to keep the wine from spoiling. Before bottling was invented wine would spoil very quickly in barrels once air got to it and bacteria could turn the Tartaric acid into vinegar (Acetic acid). Even the “air” space you see at the top of a bottle is not air; it is pure Nitrogen gas.

Imagine yourself sleeping for many months and then be rudely awakened.  Would you be ready for anything? That is what happens to wine. It has been quiet and sleeping for 2 years, and then suddenly pumped into holding tanks, through a hose and then bottled. Wine will eventually come around, some in a few days and others in a few weeks (Pinot Noir).