Processing Red Grapes: More Options

Last time, I showed  you the basic destemmer used at Babcock for whole berry fermentation. Today, a couple of other options. At Painted Rock Winery in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, as well as destemming, we also crush and sort the grapes. In the pic below, you can see the familiar destemmer on the left, the sorting table,(positioned below the destemmer), which feeds into the crusher,(on the right of the pic) which, in turn feeds into the must pump below it. A 4-inch hose is attached at the output end of the must pump in the foreground at the bottom of the pic:

Here's a closeup of the sorting table:

The destemmed grapes fall out of the destemmer and onto the far end of the table. The table jiggles, encouraging the grapes to work their way down the table, and spread themselves out so we can get a good look at them. The main thing we're looking for is jacks (bits of stem) that have found their way through the holes in the destemmer, and any leaves or rotten grapes. The amount of jacks varies according to the grape variety. Varietals with larger berries have fewer jacks slipping through because the grapes are blocking more of the hole. In larger wineries that can absorb the extra cost, they may have several cylinders with different-sized holes corresponding to different grape varieties.

Any juice runs through the slots in the table into the pan below, and from there drains into a bucket. The grapes proceed down to the open end of the table where they empty into the crusher. Here we are hard at work (in this case, sorting Chardonnay):

Spending several hours at a sorting table during a Canadian harvest is not the most enjoyable part of winemaking. Those grapes are cold! With a smaller destemmer, we have to go pretty slow (or it gets clogged up) so it takes about 15 minutes to get through a half-ton bin of grapes. After about 5 minutes, your fingers start to get painfully cold, by 10 minutes, they're numb and don't really work anymore. We keep a bucket of hot water next to us, ready to plunge our hands into the second that bin is finished. The other issue is the jiggling! Some people have a hard time looking at it, and literally get dizzy/nauseous from it. An activity best not done with a hangover!

So why does Painted Rock sort grapes while Babcock doesn't? One reason might be the flavours that may be imparted by the stems. As well as adding tannins, stems might add a green (literally "stemmy") flavour which might not be noticeable with the superripe grapes of California, but might be in BC where the growing season is shorter and the grapes--and subsequent wine--may have more of a green/bell pepper character already. Picking out the jacks may help to mitigate this.

I've also worked at a winery in BC where they sort BEFORE destemming. The whole clusters are dumped onto the sorting table and we pick out leaves and whole bunches of rotten grapes. In retrospect, that's kinda weird, since that level of sorting really should have been done in the vineyard by the pickers.

Anyway, back to Painted Rock: The grapes leave the sorting table and go into the crusher:

There are two sets of interlocking rollers that spin in opposite directions. You can adjust the distance between the rollers to crush the grapes more or less, or to account for larger- or smaller-berried varietals. The crushed grapes fall out the bottom of the crusher and into the must pump:

The auger pushes the must (grapes and juice) through to the hose that's attached at the end (on the right, out of the picture, here), and on into the tank, which is the fermenting vessel of choice at Painted Rock. PR also has a little different system for getting the grapes into the destemmer:

The grapes are dumped into the hopper at the bottom of the elevator, which then takes them up the conveyor and into the small funnel/hopper of the destemmer. We can control the amount of grapes going up the elevator by holding them in the hopper with a pitchfork. That way, the little destemmer doesn't get clogged.

Here's the whole setup:

And from the other side:

Finally, again from Babcock, a relic from the past, the combo crusher/destemmer. Backwards to the way things are done these days, here the grapes are first crushed, and then destemmed:

The above pic is the machine, opened up and partially taken apart. You can see half of the perforated, cylindrical drum in the background. In the machine, itself, you can see the spinning paddles and above that, you can see the 3 parts of the crusher sticking up. A funnel-shaped hopper fits over this top part, guiding the dumped grapes through the crusher, which looks like this up close:

The rollers spin in opposite directions towards each other to crush, in this case, whole clusters of grapes before sending them on to the destemmer.

Just a few examples of how red wines get their start, once they leave the vineyard. Next post, we'll be getting the fermentation started and making these grapes w(h)ine!