First Grapes of 2014!

So excited! We got things started with one of our single vineyard Pinot Noirs that is often the first to come in when harvest gets underway. This one comes from the Rita's Crown vineyard on Santa Rosa Road in the Santa Rita Hills AVA. Our little slice of heaven from that vineyard is called just that--once it gets into bottle--Slice of Heaven.

All of our single vineyard Pinots at Babcock are whole-berry-fermented. This is not to be confused with a whole-cluster fermentation, where the whole bunches, stems and all, go into the fermenting vessel. For whole-berry, we destem, but do not crush. When you destem the grapes, of course a little juice is going to come out because you've broken the skin, but not as much as when you crush. And again, here, don't confuse crushing with pressing. Pressing is what we do after the fermentation is finished (in the case of reds) where we give it a really hard press and get every last bit of liquid out. Crushing is much more gentle, usually done by putting the grapes between spinning rollers that can be adjusted according to grape size and the amount of crushing desired. You end up with a lovely soup of juice and skins, ready for the next step. Whole berry is a little less soupy, but just as lovely.

The trusty old destemmer at Babcock has some nifty modifications. There is a standard type of destemmer that is widely used, and necessitates placing a vessel under the destemmer to catch the grapes and then pallet-jacking that vessel out from underneath--kind of slow and laborious. But here's what happens at our place:

We have 2 sets of tracks with rollers that use gravity to push a series of bins (white bins on the left catch the discarded stems, and white plastic-lined brown, wooden fermenting bins on the right catch the grapes) under the destemmer. The comparatively small portion of this contraption--the part with the faded blue on the left end, the red and black graphic to the right of that, the small, funnelly part on the right end and the thin blue plastic strip below that, is what constitutes the actual destemmer. The rest is all for loading and unloading of the machine. In this pic, the forklift has just loaded the first of the wooden bins (for grapes) at the far end, and it's rolling down into position next to the white bin (for stems). When the bins are loaded and we're ready to go, from the side, it looks like this:

You can see there's quite a steep grade the bins are coming down, and that the first fermenter bin on the left is now in position under the small plastic blue chute where the grapes are going to come out. How does it stay in position and not roll forward too far? That's the cool part. there's a horizontal bar (just even with the upright post of the frame at the back of the leftmost bin), operated by a switch, that comes down and traps the bin right where you want it. In the pic below, you can see the bar holding the plastic-lined bin (the other thin metal sheet clips over the tops of 2 bins to keep them from separating). When that bin is full, we raise the horizontal bar and gravity forces the bin down to the end where a forklift is waiting to whisk it away to its next adventure. As the bins fill, we take them away at one end, the empty ones roll down into place, and we load more empty ones at the other end. Same goes for the other track with the white bins for stems.

 

So the grapes start out by getting dumped into the large hopper on top that funnels them down to its bottom: 

 

At the bottom of that is an auger-thing that herds them through a short tunnel and then down into the small funnelly hopper at the right end of the destemmer-proper:

Grapes get spit out pretty quickly (through the blue chute) and stems continue on to their fate at the other end of the destemmer, ending up in the white bins.

The forklifts have cool attachments for dumping the bins. They grab on to the sides and the front of the 1/2 ton picking bins, as well as having forks through the bottom, so you can turn them almost completely upside down without dropping them. In other wineries, I've also seen forklifts that dump sideways instead of frontwards as we do here:

After dumping the bin, we rinse it with hot water immediately to keep the grape material from hardening on in the hot sun.

But just how does the destemmer work? Well, inside that comparatively small metal box, there is a horizontally spinning cylinder full of holes, through which the grapes fall into the chute and into the fermenter. The following are pics of the destemmer at Painted Rock Winery in British Columbia (same type as Babcock uses, just a little smaller). All that pink is from tartrates, built up over many days of destemming during harvest 2013.

The stems are too gangly to easily fall through these holes. Within the cylinder, is a spinning thing with paddles:

It drives the stems to the other end of the destemmer where they are spat out and discarded (or used to fertilize the vineyard).

So it all kinda goes together like this, within the main rectangular box that is the destemmer. First is the empty destemmer housing with the side panels open and seen from the end opposite the small hopper (you can see the chute where the grapes go down:

Same view with the cylinder in place:

Same view with the paddles in place:

Altogether, but with side panels open:

All put together and with side panels closed:

Next time, I'll talk about some other setups for processing red grapes.