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You've been waiting all season for your grapes to ripen, and you've just heard that they are being picked soon. You've also laid out your plan for how you are going to handle those grapes when they come into the winery. Now it's time to set the machinery in motion. But what does that look like, and what do you have to be ready for once you see the fruit? Read on to find out. Once the grapes are picked, they are gathered in specialized containers and delivered to the winery, where, after being weighed, they are ready to be processed. If for any reason the fruit can’t be processed the day it comes in, the staff stores it in a cool room to keep it fresh for longer. Inside the Winery, the Magic of Winemaking Starts with Grape Processing As Crushpad winemaker Kian Tavakoli explains, processing is a very important step in wine making that involves two main stages: sorting and crushing. Once these steps are completed, winemakers can add sulfur to the pressed fruit, then soak it, and let it ferment for a while under the action of wine yeast. Later, depending on the varietal of grape used and the type of wine that needs to be obtained, the produce can be stored either in wooden barrels or in metallic containers, where it is left to age. A Closer Look at the Machinery Used in the Early Stages of Winemaking Once at the processing table, the fruit is dumped into a hopper. From there, an industrial rolling carpet carries it into a destemmer, where the pallets of the machine separate the berries from the stems, dumping the fruit onto the shaker table. Manual sorting can now begin, to make sure that no leftover jacks, green berries or dehydrated berries will make it through to the next stage. As Kian Tavakoli describes, not every varietal of grape undergoes the same treatment: “[…] White grapes, for the most part, get directly dumped into the presses as whole clusters. Red grapes, on the other hand, typically require more processing.” At the end of the sorting process, winemakers can choose to either drop the fruit directly into the bin, or to wheel in the crusher to split the berries as much or as little as necessary. According to Tavakoli, this part of the process largely depends on the specific requirements of each client: “One thing that many of the clients that come here to take part in the processing is to actually taste the wine with the winemaker, and make the call as to whether they want to do a lot of whole berry or whether they want to do a lot of splitting.” As Tavakoli points out, this decision influences many of the characteristics of the resulting wine, and therefore plays a crucial role in wine customization. In fact, clients that come to Crushpad are encouraged to take active roles at every stage of the wine making process and make their own calls with respect to many of the controllable attributes of the wines they want to create. For more resources about winemaking or about wine making, please review http://www.crushpadwine.com.
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