Crushing 101

Yesterday (Tuesday) we crushed the Chardonnay that sat overnight in the cellar room. Crushing, like destemming, is done using gravity flow. The wine falls into the crusher and depending on the grape type, goes through a series of stages to release all the juice from the grapes. As most whites are only crushed once and the skins are then thrown away, they go through a longer process of crushing than reds. Red wines continue to sit on their skins and extract color and flavor while the whites are a one time deal. So the Chardonnay is fed into the crusher and whala, dirty wine as you will see in the pictures! You still get a few seeds and other debris that make it through the tiny holes in the crusher so there will be a series of rackings and filtration to make this dirty wine nice and clean. After almost two hours the crushing is finished and the grapes come out looking like smooshed raisins. They have almost no flavor or juice left at all, trust me I tried. The juice is pumped into a tank and left overnight again to settle. Racking is when you take the top layer of juice from the tank and pump it into another tank leaving most of the dirty part of the wine behind. That will be done for the Chardonnay tomorrow. Hope all is well this week, weather is still beautiful everyday. High of 85 and low of 55 most days and usually not a cloud in the sky. And the dog was spotted at a local coffee shop this weekend. His name is Tiger Woods of Napa and apparently has a website! Ciao~