the great wine experiment

Last year I bought 200 pounds of grapes, half Cab and half Chardonnay; about 5 gallons each.  It was the proudest thing I'd ever concocted - one could hardly come over without being forced to sample the immature wine (and believe me, every garden variety platitude just made things worse).  Specifically, the Chardonnay was turning out beautifully.  However, on one cold night in March after coming home at 1AM from a weekend trip to Portland, I moved the 5 gallon glass jug of Chardonnay to watch the bottle disintegrate before me and spill virtually all of it throughout the floor of my 500 square foot studio.  Fortunately, Liz said, I lived in a garage. 

Instead of admitting defeat, the lessons I learned were to hedge my bet (buy more grapes) and to stop using glass (buy a barrel).  So last Thursday, after 6 months of planning, saving and waiting, Liz and I rented a pickup truck and drove to Paso Robles to pick up 850 lbs of grapes from one of my favorite wineries.  In the meantime I had collected hundreds of dollars of used winemaking equipment (more carboys, a small barrel the size of a keg, a corker and grape press, and various assorted crap), and the only way I could justify buying it all was to process an exorbitant amount of grapes.  Furthermore, I gave myself license to go nuts buy calling this harvest an experiment by which I'll be testing five different methods of winemaking to hopefully settle on one favorite. 

Here's a brief overview of the events of the past week:

This is me in front of 700 pounds of Zinfandel, which looks like
this picture here on the Right (above).  Up close you can see the
stems, which are separated from the berries using the giant
de-stemmer crusher pictured below (seen with the forklift lifting the 700 lbs into it). 


 


After crushing, the grapes are called Must and
look like the stew shown on the right here.  In this state,
it's perfect for pumping through a hose into four
garbage cans (no, not food grade fermentation buckets)
in the back of our rental truck.

 

Part 2:

We took the must home through the 100 degree heat, and by the time it all got home, it was already trying to ferment.  We pitched a store-bought yeast into most of the buckets, and left a barrel's worth to ferment naturally (with whatever yeast was already on the grapes in the vineyard; a method that's risky but potentially makes a very complex wine).  During fermentation, the skins need to be "punched down" (which I bought a Cement stomper from Home Depot to do), and in a few days the fermentation was over and the fun starts all over again with pressing:

Here's Liz scooping the grapes into the press.  Notice the smile is also for the five garbage cans in the kitchen to be gone.  To be fair, the winery smell was so bad that for about two days I was afraid to turn on the stove.

And here's the "free run" juice being collected into a 6-gallon carboy.  The carboy, this time, is made of plastic.

After the free run has run, blocks are put onto the grape skins and screwed down using a ratchet press system to squeeze the living bejeezus out of the skins to get those last few drops.

Finally, the wine is packaged away for bulk aging and various corrections of acidity as needed.  Over the next 6 months I'll be periodically siphoning these things in and out of a small barrel and removing sediment as it accumulates.  More pictures, and hopefully some tasting notes, to come.