Day 106-107: Wallington Wines, Crushing, Pressing, and Getting Into Vats

I hope these videos work for once, although I bet they won't.  

This is crushing grapes.  The machine has a hopper on the top which feeds the grapes slowly into two interlocking gears.  Once crushed, a series of whirling arms separate out the stems, and the seeds, pulp, and juice fall into the bottom, where they are all pumped through a hose into a vat.

This is crushed Chardonnay.

Here's the thing, though.  White wines don't sit and ferment on their skins and seeds the way reds do.  They'll get too tannic.  To remove the seeds and skins, but save as much of the juice, the whole mess is run through giant press:

And then the liquid is pumped into a second vat.

At a low tech winery like this, many of the vats don't have bottom drains, so the only way to get the pulp out and into the press is to put on a pair of waders, and jump in.

This is Simon:  He drew the short straw and had to get in first.  These are the Chardonnay grapes that had been in the cold box over night, so the liquid was probably around 65 degrees.  Probably pleasant on a hot day, but only for a few minutes.

So who would volunteer to jump in next, but Molly, of course!

2000 liters of pressed Chardonnay juice later, I had the great pleasure of hosing her off.

A quick note about the winery:  Sanitation is non-existent.  At most, things are pressure washed to get rid of the bird crap that had been falling all over them for the off season.  As a brewer, this just seemed, well...batshit crazy.  Everything a brewer does is designed to clean, sanitize, or maintain the sanitary nature of our product (until you get into funk and barrel aging, but that's another story), so do literally hose off a stainless vat that has dirt, grass, mud, boot scuffs, and bird shit, and say, "That's good enough to make wine in," was always weird to me.  As Molly said, "It's amazing that such a haphazard process could make such a great refined product."

And she was right, despite the half-assing of cleaning and process, the wine from Wallington was good.  And we were drinking a lot of it.  I guess that's Terroir for you.