Putting the wine to bed

Well, that's it, it's finished, we've now pressed everything off and put it back in a tank to rest for the winter, and hopefully do it's malolactic fermentation.  I say hopefully because everyone is saying that the malos aren't happening quickly this year, and we may have to wait until the spring. We even filled 3 barrels, one with pure grenache that we pressed last week, and two with the syrah that we pressed on Saturday. 

It's always a good feeling to press, that means that the fermentations are mostly done, you no longer have to do one or two pumpovers a day and no more delestages (I recently learned that the American term is "rack and return" which is pretty logical.)  A delestage consists of pumping off all o f the free-run juice from the tank into an empty one and then letting the cap of skins settle for 15 minutes to a half hour, then pumping the juice back into the tank over the top of the skins.  It's another way to extract more from the skins, and we tend to do it 2-3 times during the 3 weeks of fermentation. The bummer about pressing is the clean up, once again you have grape skins everywhere!  Cleaning the press is no picnic either. 

This year, pressing was a bit disappointing though, because it's not until you're finished pressing that you know exactly how much wine you made.  Well, this year we have a new record for low yields, 46.5 hectolitres, which is less than half of what we made last year.  The mildew attacks that we had in early spring really did their damage.  I was hoping for 50 hectoliters, but we didn't quite make it.  We're pretty happy with the quality though, so in the end I consider ourselves lucky.  We know people that lost 80-90 % and we also know people that are completely unhappy with the wines this year.  So, we may not have much, but it's tasting good, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves over the next 9 months.

As always we have friends that are interested in what we're doing, so this weekend we had some visitors, and of course they wanted to help!  Here's Lise and Nicolas giving it their best effort, pulling the grape skins out of the vat.  There's a lot of them so it's always nice to have help.  Our second-hand basket press is still plugging along and giving us some great press wine, which we almost always blend right back in with the rest. 

As I mentioned earlier, we acquired some used barrels from Burgundy that are 2 years old.  We've wanted to experiment with aging in oak for the past couple of years but didn't really have the opportunity.  We bought 10 used barrels, hoping to do a bit more experimenting, but due to the small quantity of wine this year, 3 is all we can do.   We have a 40 hectoliter tank that is full, and has to remain that way until bottling and then there was only enough to fill the three barrels and that's it, c'est tout, basta! 2008 should be a good year, miniscule quantities, but delicious, drinkable wine, and that's we have always wanted to make!

Comments

[Tim Stephens]

I have a little basket press that gives me about 25L/load including the free run -- and I get sick of cleaning that little thing and all the associated buckets and tubs at the end of pressing. I've always been told that you should expect to spend as much time getting ready to do some work -- and then that much time again cleaning up after having done some work -- as you would spend to do the work itself. Ah, the less glamorous side of wine making. Thank goodness for friends and neighbors! :-) Here's hoping that what you lost in yield you make up for in quality.