Did you ever see that Saturday night live skit with Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon pretending to be Arnold Schwartzenegger-wannabes, Hanz & Franz? They’re tagline was “We just want to PUMP (clap) YOU UP!”
I realized this afternoon that we do the same thing with our red grapes! Let me explain.
We received Concord grapes in on Monday afternoon and they have been bubbling away down in the cellar all week. In general, most red varieties are destemmed and crushed, then added into an open-top tank to ferment in contact with the skins. This allows time for all the color compounds to migrate out of the skins and into the wine.
The only problem is that all those skins (and seeds) float to the top where a majority don’t even touch the liquid at all, and possibly dry out. The dried cap could then be a breeding ground for wine microbes which cause yucky (that’s the technical term) flavors in the wine.
To keep that from happening, clyde stirs up each tank to keep the cap moist and in contact with the fermenting wine. Here’s a picture of the set-up to stir all this stuff together:
The white bins each hold about a 1/2 ton of grapes, and once the grapes are crushed – well, let’s just say they hold a whole lotta juice! Clyde uses his pump (the blue machine in the lower left corner of the picture) to bring the fermenting wine at the bottom of the bin up to the top. As the liquid pumps over the top of the cap, he’ll move the end of the hose around so everything gets stirred in. This is called a ‘pump over’.
Before he had this pump, he used an tool that looked like an over-sized potato masher to punch that cap down into the wine and mix it in. Talk about a muscle-building, non girly-man workout!
At the moment we have 5 bins, and each one gets a pump over at least once a day.
Here’s a closer look at the cap:
Once the wine has fermented a few days in contact with the skins, he will pump all this stuff up into the press and strain out the fermenting juice. So that is our plan for tomorrow morning.
I hope you have enjoyed this peek into the wine making process. Be sure to check back tomorrow for a very special announcement!
2 Comments
Kate – what do you do with the leftover stuff from making the wine. Is there a way to recycle it? Which reminds me of Ben & Jerry’s which takes the leftover whey from making ice cream and feed pigs with it. They set some pig farmers up in business and you can buy a “Cherry Garcia” ham (or whatever other flavor). I think there was only one flavor the pigs wouldn’t eat, but don’t remember what it was. So was just wondering if there is a recycle process like that in the wine-making business?
We don’t feed any pigs with the leftovers, but we do compost it for use as future mulch. I’ve had someone else ask me about using it to feed pigs recently too. I’m personally not aware of any operations that are selling/giving their skins and seeds to livestock farms, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening either. I’ll check into this idea a bit more…..although we probably ham it up enough around here as it is!