Who wants to crush some grapes?
I'm in my 5th vintage of making wine with the Bacchus Winemaking Club in San Carlos. I can't exactly call myself a winemaker, since the wine is made by a professional, Dominick Chirichillo, but I do get a chance to take part in all the major steps and most of the major decisions that go into the wine. However, before I get involved, the grapes must be harvested (picked), sorted and delivered to the winery (Bacchus). I think I'm only missing out on some dirty work and getting scraped up by grapevines, however it did look pretty glamorous in the movie "A Walk in the Clouds".
So by the time I see the grapes they have been nicely sorted into bins (either the bins they are picked into, which are small 30 lb bins, or large, 1-2 ton bins), placed on a palett (wooden platform that can be picked up by a forklift for easy moving), and they are ready to be crushed. Each year when I've asked friends to help me out with the crush, there is at least two giddy people who ask if they get to stomp on them with their bare feet. YUCK! Would you want to drink a wine that you knew was stomped on with anyone's feet? I know Lucy did it that way in the TV show and all, but I don't think you saw her drink that wine later (whoever has time to look this up on Youtube to confirm, let me know). Crushing involves dumping the bins of grapes into a big machine called a crusher/destemmer, which then removes the stems and any remaining leaves from the grapes and breaks the skins releasing some of the juice. We crushed about 10 bins of Syrah, 8 bins of Mouvedre, and 16 bins of Grenache. The result of crushing about 1000 pounds, or 1/2 ton of grapes is approximately 60 gallons of wine (1 Barrel). My crushing buddy (the budding photographer who took these photos) and I were tired.
After the last bin has been dumped into the crusher, we make sure all the juice has left the machine and then shut the noisy contraption off. The product of the crush has been pumped from the crusher through a big red hose into a large plastic vat. The vat now contains juice, skins and seeds from the grapes. Next we test the sugar content of the wine to see what adjustments need to be made, if any. The tool that we used for testing the sugar was a refractometer, but you can also use a hydrometer; both are measuring the density of your solution (the juice) to tell you how much sugar is dissolved in it. Grapes are generally picked so that their measure of sugar in degrees, called the brix, is below 24 degrees (which results in about 14% alcohol, since the sugar converts to alcohol at a ratio of .58*brix). Today our wine measured at about 26 degrees. The high sugar content is typical in the region that we get our grapes from(Amador County), because the temperatures there are much warmer than in Napa. This usually means that you end up with a wine that is slightly sweet, or a wine that is high in alcohol, but you can alter this by adding water before the wine goes through fermentation. We had the experience in our third vintage, a wine my husband and I served at our wedding, that when 27 degrees brix converts to 15.8% alcohol, the resulting wine is little tough to drink and stay standing. Lesson learned, we added about 4 gallons of water and brought the brix down to about 25 degrees, which is slightly high, but I couldn't bear to add anymore water to the yummy juice. I hope we didn't stop too soon!
The final step in this part of the process is to add sulfer dioxide (a preservative), yeast (which causes fermentation as the yeast feeds on the sugar), and sometimes acid (called acidulating). The grapes have some naturally occuring yeast on their skins, however, winemakers generally like to add a preferred strain of yeast to have more control over the process. The yeast Dominick likes to use is called Pasteur Red. As for acidulating, I have an aversion to acidulating that developed from some snobby wine folks in Napa, so I won't let Dominick do it. This, in additon to the hesitation to add more water, is a choice I'm hoping doesn't come back to haunt me in the form of 24 cases of really sweet wine, but so far all of our vintages have been delicious and we've never added any acid.
Just to quest your thirst for knowledge, the opposite of adding water would be adding sugar. This is called chaptilization and is generally done in cooler climates (like Germany), but is illegal in California.
Next step...PRESS. We will press the grapes next Wednesday!
I'm in my 5th vintage of making wine with the Bacchus Winemaking Club in San Carlos. I can't exactly call myself a winemaker, since the wine is made by a professional, Dominick Chirichillo, but I do get a chance to take part in all the major steps and most of the major decisions that go into the wine. However, before I get involved, the grapes must be harvested (picked), sorted and delivered to the winery (Bacchus). I think I'm only missing out on some dirty work and getting scraped up by grapevines, however it did look pretty glamorous in the movie "A Walk in the Clouds".
So by the time I see the grapes they have been nicely sorted into bins (either the bins they are picked into, which are small 30 lb bins, or large, 1-2 ton bins), placed on a palett (wooden platform that can be picked up by a forklift for easy moving), and they are ready to be crushed. Each year when I've asked friends to help me out with the crush, there is at least two giddy people who ask if they get to stomp on them with their bare feet. YUCK! Would you want to drink a wine that you knew was stomped on with anyone's feet? I know Lucy did it that way in the TV show and all, but I don't think you saw her drink that wine later (whoever has time to look this up on Youtube to confirm, let me know). Crushing involves dumping the bins of grapes into a big machine called a crusher/destemmer, which then removes the stems and any remaining leaves from the grapes and breaks the skins releasing some of the juice. We crushed about 10 bins of Syrah, 8 bins of Mouvedre, and 16 bins of Grenache. The result of crushing about 1000 pounds, or 1/2 ton of grapes is approximately 60 gallons of wine (1 Barrel). My crushing buddy (the budding photographer who took these photos) and I were tired.
After the last bin has been dumped into the crusher, we make sure all the juice has left the machine and then shut the noisy contraption off. The product of the crush has been pumped from the crusher through a big red hose into a large plastic vat. The vat now contains juice, skins and seeds from the grapes. Next we test the sugar content of the wine to see what adjustments need to be made, if any. The tool that we used for testing the sugar was a refractometer, but you can also use a hydrometer; both are measuring the density of your solution (the juice) to tell you how much sugar is dissolved in it. Grapes are generally picked so that their measure of sugar in degrees, called the brix, is below 24 degrees (which results in about 14% alcohol, since the sugar converts to alcohol at a ratio of .58*brix). Today our wine measured at about 26 degrees. The high sugar content is typical in the region that we get our grapes from(Amador County), because the temperatures there are much warmer than in Napa. This usually means that you end up with a wine that is slightly sweet, or a wine that is high in alcohol, but you can alter this by adding water before the wine goes through fermentation. We had the experience in our third vintage, a wine my husband and I served at our wedding, that when 27 degrees brix converts to 15.8% alcohol, the resulting wine is little tough to drink and stay standing. Lesson learned, we added about 4 gallons of water and brought the brix down to about 25 degrees, which is slightly high, but I couldn't bear to add anymore water to the yummy juice. I hope we didn't stop too soon!
The final step in this part of the process is to add sulfer dioxide (a preservative), yeast (which causes fermentation as the yeast feeds on the sugar), and sometimes acid (called acidulating). The grapes have some naturally occuring yeast on their skins, however, winemakers generally like to add a preferred strain of yeast to have more control over the process. The yeast Dominick likes to use is called Pasteur Red. As for acidulating, I have an aversion to acidulating that developed from some snobby wine folks in Napa, so I won't let Dominick do it. This, in additon to the hesitation to add more water, is a choice I'm hoping doesn't come back to haunt me in the form of 24 cases of really sweet wine, but so far all of our vintages have been delicious and we've never added any acid.
Just to quest your thirst for knowledge, the opposite of adding water would be adding sugar. This is called chaptilization and is generally done in cooler climates (like Germany), but is illegal in California.
Next step...PRESS. We will press the grapes next Wednesday!
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