Pressing Matters...Harvest is Over

Harvest time is always the most exciting time of the year, not always for positive reasons however. Wine, for all its importance if culture and history, is still - at its core - an agricultural product. As such, the grower ceeds much control to Mother Nature. We are never comfortable about the vintage. We're a little more at ease when all the fruit comes in, but then there is the next important matter of when to press wines off the skins.

This is where we are now with our Pinots. All of our fermentations are done in 1.5 ton open-top fermenters. Tom Stutz tastes each of these fermenters (we have over 30 going at any one time) every day tracking the progression of flavors, aromas, sweetness, tannin, and the like until he feels that the wines can come off the skins. We tend to leave our wine in fermenters nearly until the point the caps submerge (this indicates that there is no more production of carbon dioxide, a by-product of fermentation and the substance that keeps the cap afloat).

Once the wine is pressed off the skins you can't go back. You can't add more color, more tannin, more extract (you can technically, but those kinds of manipulations are not in our winemaking playbook). Essentially, the wine is made. Any flavor and aromas changes to the wine will come from the presence (or lack) of new barrels and exposure to oxygen.

Over the course of the next week or so all of our wines will be in barrel undergoing the next phase of their lives.