We pressed off our last load of grapes, the 2024 Cabernet Sauvignon to tank and to settle for one week, then to barrels for final aging and before bottling. We refer to this time of year as “crush” which involves making the final decision to pick off the vineyard blocks, crush and de-stem the grapes and place them into the fermenters to convert the sweetness of the grapes to wine. Crush is a special time of the year as it defines what you will sell in two years providing the funds to continue your efforts as well as it defines you as a winemaker, your style and who you are.
This year we focused on bringing fruit from the V75 vineyard (www.v75vineyard.com) which included 3 tons of Merlot, 3 tons of Malbec and 3 tons of Cabernet Sauvignon. Picking decision was based on tasting the flavor profiles of the grapes and the maturity of the fruit. We have a strict protocol that we use in making the pick decision and shared that with the vineyard team and they in turn followed our direction as team members in deciding to pick. Once the grapes were picked at the earliest time of the cool morning, the grapes were loaded in a refrigerated truck and transported over the pass and into Woodinville. Crushing and de-stemming then proceed that following morning.
Once we crushed and de-stemmed, the fruit was then moved to the fermenter. Choosing the type of fermenter to use is interesting. Do we move to open top wood tanks, open top stainless-steel containers, closed stainless-steel tanks, two-ton plastic bins or concrete tanks? When I started making wine back in the early ‘80s there were few options for equipment selection, yeast and nutrient selection, but in today’s world there are rather expensive crushers with optical sorting, gentle air pumps, concrete tanks and more. Today’s world in winemaking has gotten more technical in how you process and what you add to the fermenter to make sure you have no problems in fermentation. In our case we made the decision to move all our wines to three-ton concrete tanks with daily manual pump-over after talking to many winemakers. Why concrete, not sure yet.
What I mean by pump over, is that once you add yeast to the juice for the alcohol conversion you also get carbon dioxide as a byproduct. That CO2 in the process raises the skins of the grape to the top of the tank making what we call the cap. That cap needs to be submerged or saturated daily to leach out the color pigment which makes the wine red as well as extract the tannin and as well as prevent any bacterial growth. We call this “cap management” and in that there are a couple of approaches. Punch the cap with a tool like a hoe to push the cap into the fermenting juice, taking wine from the bottom and spraying it over the cap manually, use automatic sprayers that are on timers to spray the cap or create screens to keep the cap always submerged in the juice. We prefer the manual approach as we can see daily what is going on.
Fermentation approaches have also changed over the years and have gotten much more technical. In years past it was simple, as there was limited yeast, nutrients, fining agents, etc. So, for this year I partnered with my old colleague Christian Roguenant of forty years, and a winemaking consultant in California to use a new protocol in making wine. He was trained in Lyon, France and started his winemaking with the Champagne Deutz. We met in California where he was the US winemaker for Maison Deutz. His training also included approaches defined in Bordeaux. So, this year’s winemaking protocol was a new one for me and I am excited to see how these wines develop.
After the start of fermentation, wine chemistry is monitored daily from brix (sugar) levels and conversion, as well as malic acid changes, pH changes and others. Once the wine is complete and in our case no sugar left, no malic acid left we then move our wines to the press for final wine extraction and barreling.
Barreling is another big deal and too much to go over here, but we use 100% French Oak, 30% new, and age at least 16 to 20 months.
Mark Newton,
Winemaker, DiStefano Winery
Nice job on the writing. this is a test to see if the link works… firewood on its way this week