Yet again everyone had a relaxed weekend, taking turns to come in to help with the Merlot pumpovers. Making red wine is all about extaction – extraction of both colour and flavour and one only has a three or four day ‘window of opportunity’ in which to do this. We draw the fermenting red wine out of the tank and pump it slowly and evenly over the skins three times a day. This is called ‘wetting the cap’ and this process ensures that the colour and flavour components situated in the skins are extracted early on during fermentation. This photo shows how intense the colour can be after only two days of pumpovers.
.jpg)
In the cool, early hours of the morning, the hand-harvesting team harvested one of our oldest and most intense Sauvignon Blanc vineyards before going on to harvest a Montpellier clone block of Chenin Blanc for our barrel fermented Chenin. By the end of the day we had picked 359 tonnes so far for the vintage, less than half way through our estimated total.
No comments:
Post a Comment