So you think you can wine? - part 2 - Pressing and barrels

While picking grapes at Puddleduck recently we learnt that Darren and Jackie Brown had decided it was time they made their first pinot and we decided to go along for the ride. We're following the process, from grape to glass, that will produce the 2010 Puddleduck Pinot. Learning was never this much fun at school.

In part 1 the grapes were picked, de-stemmed and crushed. Yeast had been added to begin the fermentation process. A week later .... we were back at the winery.

Step Five - Go for a plunge

During the week the sugar in the grapes was being converted into luscious, delicious alcohol (fermenting) so the juice has now turned into wine .... well sort of. It was now time to worry about the aesthetics. Red wine gets its colour from contact with the grape skins. The trouble is skins keep floating to the top and this reduces the amount of contact. So they need to be pushed back into the wine underneath. 

This process is imaginatively called plunging ... 

Darren needed to know how much sugar still remained after a week of fermenting.  So it was time to do another test and have another taste!

Interestingly even after such a short time the grape juice tasted like pinot. Very young, highly acidic, lots of fruit and no backend to speak of but pinot like nonetheless. In fact we've bought some that tasted worse than this in the past ... seriously!

Step Six - Pressing the grapes

Satisfied that things were progressing as they should Darren gave the order "Let the pressing begin!" or something along those lines. The minions ... er highly paid professionals ... leapt at his command and began to bucket the grapes from the bins into the press. The Puddleduck press is an impressive looking machine that squeezes the grapes by inflating a rubber bag within a metal cylinder. 

Think of grape pressing as like a cuddle. It starts off lovely and gentle. Then it gets tighter and seems to go on just a bit too long. If you've had one of these cuddles you'll know you go from enjoyment to being a bit freaked out. You promise yourself that if you get out in one piece you won't go out with that person ever again. It took a number of these lovely then a bit freaky squeeze and relax cycles to force all the wine into a tray that sits below the press. 

Wine makers give the name 'free run' to the wine that comes from the first press. Think of an orange juice container and what the juice looks and tastes like when you forget to shake the container before pouring the juice into a glass. That's the free run. This means that the free run often has slightly softer flavours than the wine that comes out from the more intense pressing cycles. However you don't want to press the grapes too hard. Over pressing squeezes the seeds and may result in the wine tasting harsh, bitter and 'grassy'. Surprisingly people don't like this. So the number and intensity of the pressing needs to be a balance between extracting the most wine as possible without over doing it.

Step seven - Barrels

The next stop for our baby wine was into the barrels. This was done using a very expensive but almost unbelievably quiet pump connected to a bunch of very manly looking pink hoses.

The baby pinot will spend quite a bit of time in their new home ...

The barrels are secondhand but this is a good thing. "They're really good french oak barrels" Darren reassured us. "They won't give the wine a big hit of oak like a new barrel" he went on to explain. Wine picks up oak flavours through contact with the wood barrel. This can happen either by putting wine into an oak barrel as is the case with this pinot. Alternatively you can have wine in steel tanks and then lower pieces of oak (called staves or planks) into the tank. Each method has its fans. "A premium product needs barrels" insists Darren. Pretty obvious which side of the debate he is on.

Controlling the type and amount of oak flavour in a wine is another of the 'arts' a budding winemaker has to master. It's possible for there to be too much oak flavour and this upsets the wine writers, judges and aficionados quite a lot. Other people however quite like the gentle head butt that comes from generous oak. The trick is to get a balance. If the 2010 Puddleduck pinot is like previous Puddleduck vintages the oak will be quite subtle.

Due to the volume of the wine one of the barrels was almost all 'free run' while the others had wine from subsequent pressings. To make sure that each barrel eventually has a balanced mixture Darren will periodically empty the barrels back into a tank and then refill them.

While the wine is transferring to the barrels Darren tests the acid level in the wine. All wine has some level of acid. It is extremely rare to find that a wine is too acidic. Sometimes, however a wine isn't sufficiently acidic. 

The acid level is important because if the wine isn't acidic enough various species of bacteria can live in the wine and make the wine taste terrible. To avoid this, if the reading isn't right, Darren would add acid. As it turned out this was unnecessary.

And so we leave our intrepid baby pinot gently fermenting in the barrels. You can see the process happening, if you look carefully at the photo you'll see bubbles in the plastic tube. When we were at the winery we pulled the plug out of a barrel and put our ear to the hole. There was this wonderful bubbling and hissing sound ... as beautiful as bird song in the morning. Darren will insulate the barrels and put in a heater to make sure the wine stays warm enough to complete the fermentation in a reasonable time. We wonder whether his children get tucked as snugly into bed each night.....

Next time ..... the wine is blended, tested some more and has malolactic acid added.

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