Grapes crushed directly in the vineyard? Sonoma County Winery is trying something new

The winemaking has not changed much over the past centuries: the grapes are harvested. The fruits are brought to the cellar to be pressed. The fresh juice goes into vats to start fermentation and is aged. Bottling closes the last part of the cycle.

But in a Napa County vineyard just north of the San Pablo Bay Wetlands, a local team recently tested a relatively new process to see if they can make better wine and potentially lower costs for an industry. which has historically been slow to adapt to new technology.

This year’s harvest gave the winemaking team at Rack & Riddle Custom Wine Services in Healdsburg the opportunity to test new machines that allowed them to squeeze and crush the grapes in the vineyard, which didn’t is done only in a few European wine regions.

The aim of the project is to get the freshest juice possible in the tanks in the shortest possible time, reducing problems ranging from road traffic to long waiting times in the cellar before the fruits can finally be processed. .

The roughly 25 tonnes of chardonnay grapes harvested from the Thomson vineyards on September 3 will serve as the basis for fermentation into sparkling wine and will also help determine if this could be a viable new technique in American winemaking.

It’s no surprise that Rack & Riddle played a role in the project. The company has developed a strong point in recent years by producing sparkling wines for its own brand as well as for other wineries, as the making of bubbles is more complicated and labor intensive due to a second fermentation. . The company produces about 2.3 million cases per year, including about 670,000 cases of sparklers, said Cynthia Faust, its business development manager.

“At the end of the day what we’re trying to do is get better quality,” said Penelope Gadd-Coster, the former executive director of winemaking at Rack & Riddle who is now a consultant for the winery. .

One of the missions of the project is to ensure that the fruit does not oxidize too much, which can lead to a bad taste. A bigger goal, Gadd-Coster said, was to separate the juice from the skins as quickly as possible before reaching the cellar.

“When we ship grapes from here to Healdsburg, they get mixed up a lot,” said Gadd-Coster, who developed his skills early in his career with J Vineyards and Winery, known for its sparkling wine program. “This is one way we can hopefully minimize that.”

The process of reducing the hours between picking and the press required heavy machinery in the family vineyard. This was provided by Pellenc America Inc., a division of the French farm equipment manufacturer that has been at the forefront of developing new technologies for use in vineyards.

For example, the Pellenc tractor has attachments that can perform preliminary pruning, spraying, leaf stripping and harvesting to save farmers the cost of finding work teams in a tight working environment and enable such work more quickly. . Indeed, the grapes harvested last weekend were picked up by a Pellenc machine, which is more and more common in the vineyards of the North Coast.

The company provided two machines for the test to help streamline operations as the grapes arrived in the collection area over a five hour period from the harvest machines.

The fruits were first dumped by forklift into a movable gondola-shaped tank that separated some of the initial juice from the grapes via a false bottom on the device. This initial juice was then pumped into a nearby truck with a large tanker truck and then driven to Rack & Riddle’s facilities, Gadd-Coster said. The first batch will probably be used for the best cuvée in the cellar, she added.

The remaining fruit was then pumped to a mobile grape press where another free-run juice occurred, with the liquid being pumped back to the tanker. The eventual hard-pressing crushing provided the final segment of grape juice for the project which will allow three different types of bottling, she said. Later that night, the tanker drove to the winery to transfer the grape juice to vats to begin fermentation.

“At this point… we’re just trying to prove the concept to see if the interest will be there,” said Pat Abert, CEO of Santa Rosa-based Pellenc America. “The two main goals (are) cost reduction and … quality.”