Day of Days: The Microwinery

Recently I got the opportunity to work for a day alongside our winemakers, chemists, cellarworkers, and enologists in the winery at Louis M. Martini.  It was a day for some of my co-workers and I to get our feet whet with wine knowledge as well as gain a deeper understanding of just what goes down behind closed doors.

Now I remember the first time I got a chance to peek inside some of the Gallo facilities.   It was a little awe-inspiring.  

So imagine my excitement when I learned I was going to put on my own oompa-loopa shoes and become a part of the magic of winemaking.  In reality, the coolest thing about the winery is how simple everything is.  Despite all the machinery and gleeming stainless steel, the biological process going on in the tanks is the exact same as it was a thousand years ago.  We're still just adding yeast to a mixture of crushed grapes to create alcohol.  As I was going to see today there were still many elements of the old world production methods, as well as many that were decidedly "new world".

The day began at 7 AM.  And what better way to start the morning then drinking!

Every morning the chemists enter the winery before everyone else to test the sugar (brix) levels of each tank and the temperature.  This crucial first step gives the entire winemaking team their starting point for the day's activities.  Because at this point the juice is changing and developing hour by hour, up to date precise measurements are needed.  To perform this test, we used a sophisticated sugar measuring device that cost more than my car.  We just wanted to taste the juice instead.  Samples of each of the fermenting tanks are brought to the lab, where they are loaded into this inauspicious testing centrifuge/time machine.  

I still don't really have a clue as to how it works, although I think its pretty much the same principle as the "Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor" from Back to the Future.  

After oogling all the chemistry lab contraptions, we were on to more drinking.  

Precise sugar measurements and data spreadsheets notwithstanding, the most important tool for the winemakers is their highly honed sense of taste.  With the lab data in hand we toured through some of the still fermenting tanks with winemaking team member Mike Eddy, who showed us just how hard it is to be a winemaker.  Imagine drinking warm, slightly carbonated, past its expiration Welch's Grape juice and trying to decipher how the flavors you're tasting will translate into a finished wine.  While the human brain can hold and identify thousands of different tastes and smells, we can only really pick out and recognize a small percentage of them.  The skill of the winemaker is in deciphering the clues hidden in the murky glass of unfinished wine and then deciding what to do.  

After testing and tasting, we got started on actually making the wine.  While originally wine was made using the wild yeast that exists naturally in the vineyard, most commercial wineries today employ cultured strains of yeast that are specifically designed to eat the sugars in grape must at a measured rate.  This was probably my least favorite part of the day because, like the leftover cups of stale Natty Light from last nights toga party, yeast smells.  

Whenever something is added to the tank of wine, its known as an addition.  The yeast is measured out, mixed in a bucket with some warm water and a little bit of wine to get the process started before the mixture is dumped into the tank.  Once everything's in there, you have to stir it up a bit.  

Using air pressure, this punch down machine squishes through the "cap" of grape skins that forms at the top of the tank after the berries have been loaded in.  The skins have all the color and lots of flavor.  And due to Carbon Dioxide gas being the other by-product of fermentation, the cap is quite tough to punch through.  This process is repeated after the addition of yeast multiple times to allow the skins and fermenting wine to marinate together.  

While the girls got to enjoy the fun of adding the yeast and punching everything down, I got sent to help with the pressing of the grape skins in another tank.  After the wine is done fermenting the tanks are drained and the juice is moved to the next step of the process.  What we're left with is a giant mound of grape skins that still contain a fair amount of juice.  Like different grades of olive oil, the juice left in the skins will still be of fairly good quality, and must be pressed in order to not waste anything.  I was given a plastic shovel, and told told to fill up a press basket, which is a 4 foot tall and 6 foot wide steel container with little holes in the side like a colander.  

From there it was on to more tasting.  We accompanied Mark Williams, the assistant winemaker into the temperature controlled barrel room where, surprise, nothing still tasted all that great.  Although heavily romanticized, many of the jobs we performed were either stinky, sweaty, sticky, nasty or some combination of the bunch.  Tasting from the tanks in the barrel room was probably more tolerable, as the wines were at somewhat stable sugar and alcohol levels, but there was still plenty of citrusy green acid that gave me the cravings for something to munch on.  

Mark's easily the tallest winemaker of the bunch, and usually sports the more stylish of what seem to be required baseball caps.  

Now began the actual hard work of the day, spending time on the sorting table.

While the rest of the winemaking process is highly technical, sorting is still a very hands on process.  As the table vibrated and sent the clusters down the line, we kept a close eye on unripe fruit, rotten fruit, or any little critters that might be getting into the wine.  The vibrations of the sorting table make everything tingle, from your nostrils down to your toes.  But while we meticulously picked through the fruit outside in the sun, little did we know there was a computer inside doing our work 10 times as fast.

This sorting machine comes from Italy, and is already in use in other fruit industries like Tomatoes and Olives.  The "holy shit" part of the machine is the big blue box, which contains a high speed camera and a computer.  As the destemmed grapes pass under the machine on a conveyor belt, the camera takes pictures of everything.  Based on scanned-in images of unripe fruit, leaves, stems and other stuff we don't want the computer identifies materials we want to separate.  Then the machine blows them out of mid air as the whole mixture is shot across the gap onto a receiving conveyor.  You can see from the photo that this machine inspires a lot of people to stand around and stare.

And that pretty much brings us to the end of the day.  My thoughts on the experience....

- Winemaking, harder than it looks and not as sexy, but still a ton of fun.

- The process is very technical, but still essentially the same as its been for thousands of years.

- Why does everyone wear caps when they're indoors?

- Grapes are very sticky.