Day 104-105: Wallington Wines, Learning and Doing Some Winemaking

When you make wine by hand, this is what you do:

You see these guys?  They're Tempranillo grapes.

You clip them, and put them into a bucket.

There's a lot of them.

When your bucket is full, you dump it into a bin.  When all the bins are full, you load them onto a trailer like this, and drive them back to the winery.

Riding on the back of an un-shockabsorbed trailer is a lot more fun than you'd think.

We made a lot of comparisons of the terrain and temperature to West Texas, and except for the hills and small mountains all around (the area of Canowindra and the winery is a bit of a basin), it could have easily been somewhere out around San Angelo to me.

The winery.  It was a pretty simple rectangular building with 3 foot thick walls, to keep it cool in the summer.

I didn't get any pictures or videos of crushing grapes (the next step) this day, but I got some later, you'll see.

The next day, chardonnay grapes.

Wednesday we picked a whole slew of these guys.  We left them in the cold box over night, to chill before crushing.

Oh look, another sunset over the grapes!

So this is what crushed Tempranillo looks like one day after crushing.  Wallington Wines allows the natural yeasts to do their thing to begin fermentation, so after crushing and leaving the grapes and juice in open (!) stainless vats, we just let them be.  Once they start fermenting actively, we'll start plunging them.  Plunging is kind of what it sounds like. We had a large stainless steel paddle, which we would use to stir and plunge the tops of the vats down to the bottom.  The skins of the red grapes tend to float to the top, so we would have push them down to ensure full fermentation.

This is a vat of Viognier picked the week before.  It's past its most rapid fermentation (what brewers would call high kreusen, a term that was not familiar to, and really had no interest to the winemakers at Wallington.  Margaret proved to be not curious at all about brewing, which eventually started grating on me, even as that's not exactly fair and I'm obviously biased towards beer vs. wine.)   It smells quite a bit like fermenting beer, very yeasty, acidic, and Carbon Dioxide-y, but with a much sharper fruitiness.

And again with the sunsets.  We had to go check on the wine at 10PM, and with the sun setting so late there, I got great views on the walk from the house to the winery.