First Grapes In Da House!!!
Two tons of Viognier arrived at the winery courtesy of Bill Bertram at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday. Vineyard source is Perry Creek Estate in Fair Play, El Dorado County.
Beautiful stuff, clean fruit, very little MOG but more dead leaf than I would have liked. As discussed earlier I did whole-cluster pressing which yielded about 150 gallons per ton of dee-li-shush juice. The Bucher Xpro 8 worked beautifully, the only downside is that we were able to press only 1000 lbs at a time. I expected it to hold at least 1500 lbs. I think that if we had destemmed the fruit it would have held that much.
Anyway, the press cycle for unstemmed, whole clusters takes two hours. Max pressure was 1.6 bar, pretty gentle. We were only able to do half the fruit Saturday and finished up pressing on Sunday. I did a light fining with Bentonite at .75 grams to the gallon and sulfited to 50 ppm. The juice will sit and settle until Wednesday; I’ll rack the clean juice into the barrels and innoculate for fermentation then.
I had talked with one of the local labor contractors and hired two guys to work on Saturday but they didn’t show up. On Sunday Nick, a guy who works for the landscape company next door to the winery came and worked with me all day, loading grapes, unloading pressed grapes and helping clean. I’ve got to watch out for my back. I have a minor herniated disc and if I over-do the physical labor I can really get into trouble. It’s way too early in the season to go down for a week with sciatica trouble.
Pictures coming soon. I left the camera somewhere …
September 5th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Lanye - I ‘m a home winemaker and have a question regarding whole-cluster pressing. I’m picking up Sav Blanc and I want to experiment with whole-cluster pressing, will a # 50 rachet press do the job? Do you recommend whole-cluster pressing? Thanks
September 8th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Tim - I sent you an email reply - basically, pressing whole-cluster, or whole-berry in a manual basket press is going to be extremely difficult. It’s do-able, but very inefficient. You’ll have to press, bust up the cake, press, bust up the cake, etc., etc., many times to get all the goody out of the grapes. The manual screw-press is very poor at this kind of thing - you end up with a very high percentage of unpressed grapes. A manual screw-press just doesn’t work well with berries or clusters.
LM