Wine making season
As summer ends its brief, humid run, mid-September brings with it grape harvest and wine making season. A few short, frenetic weeks of work must be done before the temperature drops too low to support the fermentation that is essential to the birth of wine.
The frenetic part is timing the arrival of the grapes with your supplier. It can be frustratingly hit or miss. If you produce just red or just white, then it’s not too much of an issue, you’ll buy your grapes, take them home and prepare to crush and press them.
Since we make red and white wines, during a year that we make both, this further compresses the timeline: we have to make white first to ensure there is no transfer of color into the press from the red grapes. The work of crushing grapes and starting fermentation is done outdoors.
Processing the grapes through the crusher is relatively quick: the cases of grapes are dumped into the crusher, the wheel is turned and the crushed grapes exit below with stems still attached. This is important because leaving the stems adds body to the wine.
Some folks use only the juice; if you don’t have room or don’t want to invest in a crusher, you can have your grapes crushed at the supplier for a fee and you will receive only the resulting juice. In my opinion, since you are skipping the fermentation, you will produce a wine that will be too sweet and lacks body.
After the crush, the grape pressing begins
The grapes are left to sit in their tub for several days; depending on ambient outdoor temperature, this can be from 2-5 days. A hydrometer aids in determining the sugar content. Red wines, other than a dessert wine or Marsala, generally have far less sugar content than white wines. Depending how dry you prefer your wine, you can begin pressing the crushed grapes when the sugar level reaches 10% for a less dry wine (think Chardonay). Wait a little longer until the sugar drops to about 5% to be more like a Pinot Grigio.
Pressing the grapes and storing the wine take place indoors. A wine press is used to, well literally, press every drop of juice from the grapes. The press works on a ratchet style action- push back and pull forward. It is not difficult -at first- to press the loaded grapes. As they are compressed more and more, it becomes necessary to wait, allowing the juice, or must, to drip down into the container and then press again.
The lovely, shapely lady
The must extracted from the press is then poured into a glass carboy or demi-john, ‘damigiana’ in Italian: a lovely lady with shapely body and slender curved neck, where it will continue to ferment. The damigiana should be loosely covered with a clean cloth which allows the fermentation gases to escape. After 7-10 days when fermentation has stopped, the damigiana will be sealed with an s-shaped air-lock filled with a small amount water. This prevents air from spoiling the still-fermenting wine while allowing the fermentation gases to safely escape. And escape it does – so much so that often you can see a froth of tiny bubbles and juice spilling onto the damigiana.
Within 3-4 weeks the must has cleared signaling the transformation to wine is complete. The new wine must be transfered to a clean damigiana in order to eliminate any accumulated sediment. The new damigiana will be sealed with another s-shaped air-lock. Now, we wait 4-6 months until the wine is sufficiently mature before bottling. Waiting is the hardest part.
