Lost my Cherry.

Well here they are. Finally grapes are in. We are finally gonna get to the juice! My first “Crush” and I have lost my cherry!

Today’s star, Pinot Gris.
Pinot Gris is, of course, the grey version of Pinot Noir and Pinot Blanc family… (Yup, a French colours quiz… Everyone get it?) as you can see it looks like a red. It is not uncommon to see a variety of colours either from different vineyards or on the same cluster because it’s the mutant of the family. But as we know grapes, much like people, are all the same on the inside, we are going to make beautiful white wine.

The game plan with whites is the grapes go straight into the press, we press off the juice and it goes into a tank to settle, then on to fermentation. Although there is always some exceptions, there is no need for extra skin contact when it comes to whites. Reds will, however, go into tank and ferment with the skins, to extract colour and all that other good stuff, and then we press of the pomace (left over skins and seeds, etc…) to make sure we get all the wine out. More on that later this week…

As I was jumping around with excitement, Jonas and David were being very nonchalant, laughing at me, “This is just one press cycle… 5 bins…”

“Well I know, but, but…. I’m just excited ok?”

Here comes the grapes. This is just one of the many fancy toys here at the winery, the tipping thing for the forklift…. (Ya I know. It probably has a cool technical name, but look at it! It tips bins!)

And here is the first tip of harvest 2010.

So we drop in the five bins, close the doors and start the press. As it spins the first of the juice starts to run and the pressing begins…

This is the juice flowing into the press pan, from which we pump off into tank. As the juice was flowing we took samples at increments during the press cycle.

Crazy colours eh? We are making white wine out of this?

To a large degree the colours were from grape solids suspended in the juice. Lots of the big stuff settles out before we ferment and soon it will be delicious, crystal clear wine.

After all the pressing, pumping and cleaning is done. (Yup. I cleaned the inside of the press again, still very cool) It’s time for that third part of the making wine equation: the Championship Beer.

Is that a look of content or what?