Harvest: Red Wine Fermentation: Extracting Colour

There is so much more work involved in the first stages of the life of a red wine, compared to that of a white wine. For the whites, we get the grapes in, and (usually) press them immediately, separating the juice from the skins and sending them off to get started on their fermentation. Easy-peasy. For reds, we're de-stemming, possibly crushing, and then fermenting with all of the skins present. We need the skins because that's where all the colour and tannins reside that are so important for the structure of red wine. The colour and tannins don't just flow freely out of the skins and into our fermenting wine. They need a little coaxing, and two methods we use for that are punchdowns and pumpovers.

Punchdowns are done on open fermenters whether they be stainless steel open-top tanks (which use some kind of temporary cover that is easily removed, or in smaller 1 1/2-ton square wooden fermenters, both of which are used at Babcock. We start punchdowns once the fermentation gets going and the C02 produced starts to force the grapes/skins  to rise to the top of the vessel to form a solid crust or cap. There's not much interaction going on between the fermenting juice and the skins at that point, so we need to immerse that cap into the juice and slosh it around a bit. The process also gets a bit of oxygen into the fermenting juice that the thick cap may be keeping out.

Wineries may punch down from 1-3 times per day throughout the fermentation, decreasing the number of times, perhaps, as the wine gets closer to dry. The punchdowns are evenly spaced throughout the day, so, unfortunately for cellar workers, if there's a third one, it will probably take place in the middle of the night. At Babcock we punch down once per day, but we have a LOT of fermenters to get through.

Because the majority of our reds (Pinot Noirs) are whole-berry, the punchdowns are quite a bit more difficult than they are when the fruit is crushed first. It can be a real challenge to get the punch (a long stainless steel pipe with a flat or curved plate on the end) to make that first break through the cap. Then you gradually move along, breaking through a little bit more at a time until the whole cap has been plunged into the liquid below and loosened up. Here's what it looks like in the 1 1/2-ton fermenter:

If the small fermenter is hard to punch down, the open-top tank, with whole-berry fermentation, is impossible--at least it is for me. Though I haven't seen it myself, they say that the cap will actually support your weight if you were to stand on it. That cap is thick and the surface area is much larger, so it's a real workout for anybody to break on through. Here's Colin working up a sweat:

Pumpovers are used in closed fermenters where you can't get at the surface to punch it down, or in very large tanks. The goal is the same--to wet the cap and get the fermenting wine co-mingling with the skins to draw out the colour and tannins. You get some aeration with this method too (even more than with a punchdown). The idea is to draw the fermenting liquid from the valve at the bottom of the tank and then pump it through a hose up and through the top opening of the tank and over the top of the cap. The liquid then makes its way through the cap, picking up the colour and tannin along the way. At Babcock, someone sits up at the top of the tank directing the flow from the hose so that it hits every part of the cap relatively equally. For a large tank, like the one below, we'll pump over once a day for 30 minutes. We use a pumpover cart that is equipped with a screen in case any grapes/skins come out through the valve--the pump really doesn't like pumping skins!

As you can see, no grapes/skins are caught in the screen here, though. This is because our big tanks are equipped with removable  screens that go on the inside of the tank around the valves. We put them in place before filling the tank, and hey, no pesky skins pouring out of the valve and making more work for us.

This is not the case at Painted Rock, unfortunately. Although the tanks are much smaller, they are not fitted with screens, so the first couple of times we pump over a tank, we are going to have many, many grapes/skins pouring out through the valve and being caught in the cart's screen. It only happens the first couple of times, because early in the fermentation, the grapes/skins have not yet formed the cap at the top and are still floating around down below, near the valve. Once the fermentation really gets going, the bottom of the cap will be well above the valve, so we'll get mostly nice clean liquid. Those first few pumpovers, though, are kinda crazy. When the grapes start pouring out, somebody shovels like mad into buckets, and then the rest of us bucket brigade it up the ladder and into the top of the tank. I have no pics of this because when it happens, it's all hands on deck and no time for taking pictures!

We pump over everything at Painted Rock, and we do it twice a day. At 20 or 25 minutes per tank, when we're at the height of harvest, we may be doing pumpovers for 4 and a half hours straight, and then, a couple of hours later, starting all over again for another 4 and a half hours.

We do have one neat item at Painted Rock that makes pumpovers  more effective. Rather than having someone sit at the top of the tank and point the hose here and there to wet the cap, we have a pumpover irrigator that does the work for us and allows us to do other things while the pumpover is going on. (Well, we still need one person on the ground to monitor the cart and make sure it neither overflows nor runs dry).  Here's what the irrigator looks like:

This isn't a very good picture, so here's a pic from a catalogue of a similar item:

The whole piece clips over the lip of the opening at the top of the tank using the screw-clamp seen halfway down the vertical part. The hose carrying the wine attaches at the top left. The bottom horizontal arm rotates naturally with the flow of the wine. The wine comes out either end and hits the plates below, fanning the liquid out to cover the cap evenly. If you have a larger tank, you can increase the reach of the arm by speeding up the pump and delivering the wine with more force. You can speed up or slow down the rotation of the arm by adjusting the angle of the plates on the bottom. Here's how it looks from the top of the tank:

It's a great piece of equipment but it's kind of heavy and awkward to wrestle in and out of the tanks, and tends to smack you in the shins when you're trying to go up and down ladders with it. Imagine how many bruises you'd get doing that every 20 or 25 minutes for 10 hours a day!

Here's another type of irrigator (called the Toad), that I've seen but have never got to use. It's about 18 inches across and really lightweight. Ahh, that would be so nice!

To summarize, getting the colour and tannin into red wine is hard work! So think of that next time you're admiring the beautiful ruby hues and commenting on the fantastic aging potential and bold structure.