Crush

It's hard to believe it has already been a week since I picked up the grapes. This year, I got Pinot from Smith Rd Ranch in Watsonville, at the end of the Santa Cruz Mountain Range.

The fruit was incredibly clean, just about zero rot, zero water berries or shot berries.  Just good, clean fruit all the way around. It made sorting through the 400+ pounds relatively fast.

The only bummer was by the time I got the fruit home and processed, the tank read 68 degrees.  So I knew I wouldn't get much of a cold soaks his year, especially since I opted to to use dry ice to cool things down.

Here is how things looked before I started to process and crush (well, after a couple of hours of cleaning and sanitizing everything) Stainless steel tank in the back for the fermentation, crusher/destemmer and the grapes in the bins. Similar to last year, I threw in as many whole clusters as I could and only crushed and destemmer maybe half of the fruit.

Grapes in the hopper, ready to be crushed and destemmed. Next year I need to figure out how to remove one of the rollers so I get more whole berries and gentler treatment of the fruit. Pinot can be a bit sensitive!

First juice coming out of the bottom of the crusher destemmer






The aftermath...takes a couple of hours to clean up..but that is winemaking.  90% cleaning and sanitizing and about 10% of the cool stuff.

  

And finally all of the grapes and juice into the stainless steel fermentation tank.