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.

Oregon Pinot Noir Crush…

is underway. And it’s going well.

It’s been a crazy last couple of months – getting ready for crush and then processing the fruit.

As the dust begins to settle and I take stock of what is going on, it turns out that I’m making Pinot Noir from seven different vineyards, and sourcing fruit from a total of 10 vineyards. I’ve processed nearly 20 tons of grapes for vintage 2006. That’s a tenfold increase from last year.

I prepared a comprehensive harvest plan prior to crush, but it turned into a dynamic exercise. At times it felt like a miniature version of a commodities exchange floor with deals happening on the fly.

For example, one producer ran short of fermentation bins and the suppliers were sold out. The fruit was being harvested and they had no place for it. I just happened to be at their winery picking up grapes from a different vineyard. I had extra fermentation bins, and we made a deal for me to buy some of their fruit in exchange for selling them bins. Meanwhile, some “maybe” deals fell through and others came up.

The net of it is that I got Pinot noir from some of the state’s best vineyards, including:
- Coleman Vineyard (McMinnville AVA)
- Momtazi Estates, home of Maysara wines (McMinnville AVA)
- Hawk’s View Vineyard (Chehalem Mountains AVA)
- Bishop Creek Vineyard (Yamhill-Carlton AVA)

Our excellent fall weather allowed the grapes to readily ripen – resulting in nearly perfect fruit. Regardless, there is considerable diversity across the vineyards. A couple of vineyards produced clusters looking more like Cabernet than Pinot – they were huge. A different site produced tiny clusters with very small berries… probably ¼ the size of the other sites.

These variances yield different concentrations and nuances in flavors, color, and tannins. It’s exciting to process the fruit side by side and watch each vineyard go down its own path. I can hardly wait until the wine is finished. 2006 is going to be a year of stellar Oregon Pinot Noir.