Pinot Noir Pressing

Winery crunch mode is slowing down. Most of the Pinot has completed fermentation with just 3 out of 14 bins finishing up. That means that I’ve been busy pressing wine.

The steps grapes go through to become wine are pretty straightforward:

1. Pick the grapes
2. Using a conveyor belt, sort all grapes, inspecting each cluster and removing things other
3. than grapes (leaves, etc.) and sub-standard clusters.
4. De-stem the grapes. At this point, there are whole berries in fermentation tanks.
5. Cold soak the berries for 3-7 days to extract color and flavor
6. Ferment the berries for 7-14 days, until all sugar is consumed
7. Pump the free run wine from the fermentation tank into barrels
8. Shovel the berry skins into a small press and lightly press them to extract additional wine
9. Age the wine in barrel

This is oversimplified, but it captures the basic steps.

When I say that I’ve been pressing wine, this translates to a fair bit of prep work and a lot of manual labor. For prep work, I’ve been deciding what wine goes in which barrel. Different coopers, forests, toast levels and barrel age all play a role in final style of the wine.

I bought some used neutral barrels this year, and several are dried out and not holding liquid. I’ve been trying to soak them so they’ll be tight. I have just enough barrels, so I need them to work.

With my spreadsheet in hand, I tackle the task of shoveling and pressing. Its mindless manual work, but I still like it. It feels good to get the wine safely into the barrels. Once the skins have been pressed and you remove the wooden press shell, you end up with a cake of dry grape skins. That’s the pic included with this post. The Pinot Noir skins are a rich burgundy color not adequately captured with my little camera.

Right now I have 26 barrels filled with wine. Four contain Syrah, and 22 contain Pinot. I have 12-14 more to fill with Pinot. It’s a good year.