#28 - Wine Making

When I first sent out the email announcing my intentions to have 40 new adventures and soliciting help from my friends, the first person to respond with an idea was my former co-worker Dave. He offered to include me in his family's annual wine making. Dave is Italian through and through and every year he makes hundreds of bottles of homemade wine.  Being part Italian myself, and having relatives who not only made wine during prohibition, but also sold it to Al Capone and his entourage (they actually get a mention in the book Capone's Cornfields, available through Amazon), I felt like this adventure was a no-brainer.  Let me remind you, however, that I'm a wine idiot (see Adventure #2 for details), so I was a little intimidated by the whole process.

Dave gets his grapes from California via a garden shop in Monument, Colorado. The delivery dates vary from year to year depending on the weather. The sugar content is the biggest factor to consider, and different breeds of grapes mature at different times. I was able to observe and participate some of the latter season grapes, those used for merlot and san grigio (pinot grigio is the same thing--or really close--wine idiot, remember?).  Obviously, wine making is not a single day event.  I was able to participate in two consecutive weekends, the crushing and then the pressing.

Crushing is pretty much just that: crushing the grapes.  While Dave does own his own crusher, for this batch  he used the crusher/destemmer at the garden shop.  This particular weekend Dave received roughly 600 lbs. of grapes.  Here are some of the grapes. They are much smaller than the grapes we are all accustomed to eating.

The crusher/destemmer is a simple but intriguing machine. You simply dump the grapes in the top, the bulk of the stems are removed and dumped out the side, and the grapes are crushed and dumped out the bottom. The :magic" occurs inside the closed box portion of the machine, so I couldn't actually see how this was accomplished. I was told it was a combination of corkscrew and a "shaking" screen type device. The crushed grapes are then poured into containers in which they will stay and ferment for about a week (in this case those containers were actually plastic garbage cans). That's all there is to week one of wine making.  I did find it appropriate that the crusher/destemmer sported a tag reading, "Made in Italy."  Right on!

For clarification, the grapes and juice are going into the white bucket above, the stems into the blue one.

 This past weekend I went to Dave's house for the pressing. It was so cool!  The engineer in me was impressed with the simple yet oh-so-efffective technology involved.  I had actually been thinking about this since the crushing.  It couldn't be too high-tech of a process, since people have been making wine for thousands of years.  Sure enough, the overall process is quite simple.  The below picture shows a wine press (and the garbage can behind it contains crushed grapes). 

Basically you scoop/ pour the crushed grapes in the top, place two semi-circular discs on top of the grapes, stack wooden blocks on top until the level reaches a corkscrew mechanism which is cranked to press the wood down on the grapes, pressing all the juice out through an opening in the bottom of the press (OK, I acknowledge that's a run-on sentence).  But, here's the really cool part. When you're done pressing, you remove the wood, unlatch the two tall semi-circular pieces that constitute the body of the press, and you essentially have a "cake" of compressed grape leftovers, much like a giant wheel of purple cheese!

About half of the grape "residue' was recycled for a second run, and the other half was tossed. Because the pressed grapes are so dry, for the second run Dave adds water and sugar to the grapes. They will ferment for another couple weeks.  I asked Dave for some ballpark averages on how many grapes it takes to produce a bottle of wine. He said it varies by grape type, but for the merlot we pressed, it would take approximately 80 lbs. of grapes to produce a 5-gallon bottle of wine.

Back to the process.  The juice was transferred again to the plastic garbage cans. It will continue to ferment for another couple weeks. Then Dave will transfer it to class containers. You have to understand something about Dave's house.  He designed and built it himself, and to call it a custom house is an understatement.  When he designed the house, he did so with his wine-making very much in mind.  The custom storage units in the garage which house all his wine making equipment is just the start. The basement is the real crown jewel of this home's Italian heritage.  The basement houses a wine cellar that is a model of efficiency. There is a hole in the kitchen floor which is the opening to a tube that drains down into the far end of the ceiling of the wine cellar. Dave can attach tubing from this hole to the mouths of huge glass jugs.  This process greatly simplifies the process of getting hundreds of pounds of juice into the wine cellar.  Because these huge jugs sit on very high shelves, a simple gravity-assisted siphon system of tubing is then used to fill smaller bottles from the huge bottles once the huge bottles have fermented for a couple of months.   These small bottles are then corked and placed in the massive wine rack in the same room.  The wine bottles in the rack below are last year's batch.   Be sure to look for hole in the ceiling above the large jugs.

The final picture I leave you with captured an amusing, albeit unexpected aspect of wine making.  All of our grape "residue" was all dumped into a wheelbarrow.  Dave's dog, Pepper, loves grape residue.  He viewed the wheelbarrow as an all-you-can-eat buffet.  With all the health benefits of grape seeds and grape skins, I figure Pepper is bound to live a mighty long live!  Here's Pepper in action.

I hope I get the chance next year to sample the fruits (haha, pun intended) of our labor. Thanks, Dave, for a grape new experience (haha, intended again!).