Fred touches on everything from fermentation temperatures to extraction levels in this focused video.
Filmed with Fred Scherrer at the winery in California and City Winery Chicago.
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Sorting table is basically a way for us to meter the rate that the grapes go into the distemper. What the destemmer is is it’s a essentially a horizontal basket with holes in it and inside is a kind of roughly a finger auger that flops the grapes around. They bang up gently between each other… all the parts that are in the machine and the grapes detach themselves from the stems they fall through their little holes and they get raked into a catch bin down below.
I can adjust the speed of this that the machine runs out so that I can as gently as possible flop things around against each other if you go too fast you might break the stems and get little pieces of stems through. If you to go too slowly you may not detach all the grapes that you want attached so then the grapes have been destemmed, they’ve fallen into the catch bin and we pick up the catch bin, I drive it inside with a forklift which is equipped with a bin rotator and it’s essentially the forks will turn. I have some bars on the bin below so that keeps the bin on the forks and I just pour it like you would a cup of coffee back into the sink or something. Drop it into the fermentation vessel.. I really don’t want to pump anything that that skins on it I think it really grinds things up more than I would like to see them ground up. There are maybe other visions of people who look look for it as part of their extraction policy I like to take things out of the Pinot Noir very slowly and gradually.
So I think this is the most consistent way to do that it’s kind of nice because I don’t have to buy anything extra to do that. I have all the equipment on hand. Essentially it’s gravity flow. We just keep reclaiming gravity by picking it up with the forklift.
We probably have free juice within that mass of grapes all the way to the top. If we don’t we’ll have somebody jump in there with the brand new clean boots that have never touched the floor and the walk on them slightly in order to liberate enough juice to accomplish that.
That way we don’t have a lot of hair spaces between grapes an interface between juicy grapes and air is a perfect opportunity for microbes to grow and many of them that grow there in the first few days may not necessarily be the things we want to happen so I would rather have a little more controlled environment where we just know where I can see that the entire surface or that interface right on the very surface of the fermentation tank.
So then those grapes are put into there, and if the grapes are warmer than I’d like them to be at this point then I put a kind of a slotted screen down inside of that mass, then put a suction hose on a pump and a pump it through a heat exchanger and recirculate it back upon itself so that I can gradually cool that entire mass.
The reason I want fairly cool grapes is I would like to delay biological activity in the fermenter.
So we’ve cooled off the grapes and then I’ll take one of my favorite tools – a co2 snow cone – Essentially we take a cylinder that has liquid co2 inside of it and these things like a fire extinguisher. It creates a very cold vapor of co2 as well as about half sort of snow. a very light carbon dioxide solid.
It kind of hovers over the grapes with the snow, as the carbon dioxide is subliming, the stuff is so light that it’s actually hovering and kind of floating over the surface and it never transfers a sufficient amount of heat away from the grapes to actually freeze them so it’s I think a much more gentle way just to get all of the the oxygen or the majority of the oxygen away from the surface of the stuff. I put a tarp over it so that it kind of holds that carbon dioxide environment there, and what this is doing is again delaying biological activity.
You know yeast will want to grow other bacteria you know particularly undesirable ones may want to grow on that surface so we’re really kind of skewing the environment away from an outcome that we don’t want – to one that we do want.