Pressing Grapes

The last few days all we have been doing is pressing grapes and cutting up sheep (see next blog).  Wine and meat–farm style. Rusfontein style.

The grapes stop fermenting when the sugar levels drops to zero and  the next step is to press. We have bought a basket press for this. Another nifty machine — it involves pouring in post-fermented grapes, catching the free-flow (which tastes very different from the pressed wine)  and then pressing the grapes squeezing the last of the juice and releasing the tannins in the skins and pips. Now I always thought tannins weren’t necessary a good thing but they seem to be the “salt” of the wine. It lifts the flavours. One needs a little bit of tannins in your red wine. So we did a lot of tasting while pressing, getting to taste the difference in the wine depending on how hard we were pressing.  Learning to differentiate between the flavour of the free-flow (unpressed) and the pressed wine.The more it was pressed the more alive the wine became, more exciting on the palate. Of course one mustn’t overpress causing too many tannins so it is about balance. The basket press is hand-pressed so I doubt one could actually overpress the wine but it was good to start to being involved in the flavour. The kids were very involved in this process, unfortunately the eleven year old enjoyed the tasting too.We are sure it was his first experience at being tipsy, we then insisted he spat after every taste–but he somehow was still sneeking in half a swallow with every spit. Rosy cheeked with  mulberry stained teeth, my son, bless him!

The actual pressing is easy, it involves packing wooden blocks on top of two wooden half circles which are placed on the grapes. Then with the help of two metal plates, a cog system and a metal rod one gently moves the press down –child’s play. Regan became our star presser, keeping the rhythm and moving it along (anything to keep him distracted from tasting!)

When one starts to use force in moving the cog system along  you know you are near the end of the press. Now one has to taste a bit to check it isn’t becoming too sharp and use your judgement as to how much one should continue pressing.

Once you stop you release the basket press and you are left with what looks like an enormous raisin cake.

This gets wheel-barrowed to the nearby veggie patch ready to get  dug in for compost.

The wine was then filtered through a funnel into the waiting oak barrels. We have two one  hundred litre barrels and six fifty litre barrels—plus a few carboys for top-up. The wine must be exposed to the least amount of oxygen as possible so one has to top up the barrels on a regular basis.

One of the fifty litre barrels is for Port–I will write about this another time–it is a slightly different process plus one has to distill alcohol to add to the fermented grape juice.

After the grape pressing we all had purple stained hands and black fingernails –oh well–not to bad for an occupational hazard (and of course that breakfast and lunchtime taste when plunging was pretty much a hazard too, leaving the shed with a tell-tell purple stain on your nose and a glowing feeling!) I am going to miss that.

Making Wine

On Friday we got our half ton of grapes plus some extra for our wine-making buddy–Kevin from down the river.

Lovely, deliciously sweet, little berries, almost like blueberries with slight old-man faces–perfect Shiraz grapes, the Cabinet a bigger grape but also sweet and very juicy, both had a sugar reading of 26—perfect for wine-making the way we wanted to do it. The Merlot  grapes looked a lot like the Shiraz but with a much higher sugar content, perhaps too high (time will tell). A high sugar content can stop fermentation so we will have to watch the Merlot carefully.

We also got some Chardonney grapes to ferment which Kevin is going to distill into alcohol and add to some of the Shiraz which will end up as Port.

 

We spent Friday evening doing our first de-stalking and crushing with our nifty little crushing machine, the grapes are tipped into the top of the machine, some-one needs to turn the handle which gently pushes the grapes through a set of rollers, while some-one else checks for any leaves or “off” looking grapes, which are disgarded before being crushed.

The slightly crushed grapes get spat out the bottom into a trough and the stems fall out the side into a crate–ready to be thrown into the vineyard as compost. At this stage the grapes still have their skins on and are not pressed, the juices have just been released.

 

According to the Garagiste the first grapes that get crushed need to be sacrificed to Bacchus. This means a small jug needs to be filled with the crushing and then thrown into the air–while we all shout “Here’s to Bacchus!!”  This apparently ensures a good vintage. Bacchus is the Roman god of wine and intoxication, the Greek equivalent of Dionysus. So not wanting to take any chances and offend any god of wine and intoxication, we got our fairest  maiden, Keya, to throw our first jug into the air and we all shouted “Here’s to Bacchus!” loudly and solemnly before getting on with the crushing. I hope Bacchus took note of our effort and our little wine-making attempt and blesses us with a really good vintage.

(this ritual could have originated from the fact that you don’t want any grapes from a previous crushing that could be stuck in the rollers to be mixed into one’s fresh crushing.)

On the right is a picture of Keya as the contents of the jug are falling on her head. Then it was time to open a beer and carry on crushing. I see this wine-making process  is full of rituals and festivities, that carry through year after year, bringing people together to celebrate, have fun and get sticky and very dirty. (and hopefully drink some good wine).

That evening we just crushed the grapes for the Port, the following day we crushed all the red grapes for all the different types of wine we will be making. Herman and Kevin did the bulk of the crushing with a bit of help from the children who decided they wanted to do it the old-fashioned way and stomped some down with their feet.

There was much squealing and excitement as the cold grapes squeezed between their toes, with all kids getting their own bottle of red grape juice to drink later–yes, they did wash their feet before hand.

 

 

After a good couple of hours later the crushing was complete. Everyone was sticky and sweet. Kevin packed his containers onto the back of his bakkie to take home, he was going to immediately add the yeast to start fermentation and then to plunge down three times a day. We have decided to go a slightly different route and have let our many containers of  Shiraz, Cab and Merlot stand in our cooler room at 10′C for three days. This is called cold maceration, it allows the grapes to relax after crushing, encourages a deeper colour extraction in red wine and wines are perceived as fruit-forward, complex with increased aromatic and colour density. It will be interesting to compare our wine with  Kevin’s next year to see if there is any difference. We will start our fermantation on Tuesday, first bringing the grapes up to temperature. In the meantime we are also plunging (pushing the top layer down to the bottom, wetting the cap) three times a day. This takes a fair amount of strength–some people go to gym, others make wine!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All in all a wonderful week-end full of fulfilling work, sweet, sticky arms, feet and toes, feeling a bit like alchemists and a passion for hand-crafted wine growing by the second–as we nuture these grapes into a bottle.

Viva le Garagiste

Herman and I spent the end of last week in Stellenbosch–the heart of wine country in the Cape. We were attending a winemaking course, hosted by that fabulous magazine-Country Life,  for the hopefully up and coming Garagiste. Garagiste is a French word (one does not pronounce the “e” on the end) coming from “vins de garage”–literally wines from a garage (though in France, I am sure, a garage is a little bit more romantic than a garage in suburbian Cape Town–perhaps an old building hewn from stone within a rambling olive grove with an ancient vineyard standing nearby, that happens to be where one parks the car!!)  Nether-the-less it refers to a small group of winemakers in the Bordeaux region that produced small-scale wine at home. No mass production and as little as possible interference, allowing  the natural flavour of the grape to come through–it is about nurturing the wine into the glass, with personal flair.  (Being completely ignorant I thought this was how all wine was made–obviously as with everything mass produced this is not the case—good homemade wine like homegrown veggies, homemade food etc etc, made with love, passion and care WILL taste better –less chemical manipulation, less human interference letting the goodness of the earth and the fruit come through.)

So we were there to learn to make wine for ourselves. We had 2 years ago already planted vines–300 of them. Mainly Shiraz (a forgiving grape ) with a little bit of Cabernet Sauvignon, some Viognier and a touch of Hanepoort and Muscadel.

It was a fabulous course–Clive Torr from Topaz wines (he has a CV in wine too long to mention or remember) gave us a lecture on “How to make wine” which was fun and  informative. He made it sound so easy and exciting, his passion really rubbed off and all of us had a turn at crushing grapes for the Country Life Garagiste 2009 Shiraz—to be drunk next year. We also had a talk on marketing and the law regarding Garagiste.(All very interesting and informative)  On the second day we were able to taste other Garagiste wines–outstanding!!! The quality of the wines was remarkable—good, honest wine!! Some of them were even naturally fermented, using no yeast but allowing the natural yeast on the skins of the grapes to start fermentation. We were blown away by the winemaker’s passion and the standard of the wine on offer.

Topaz’s Pinot Noir and Shiraz (Syrah) and Black Pearl’s Oro (shiraz/cab mix) really stood out for us. Topaz is produced in a carport in Somerset West and this is where our Country Life wine was headed to be plunged three times a day until fermentation stops and then stored and looked after for a year—so it is looking good!!  We tasted 20 wines before lunch (spitoons not used) then had a glorious lunch with a fantastic group of people all enthusing about wine and of course drinking MORE wine—needless to say, NO headache later, no feeling sleepy nor grumpy–a result of the lack of human intervention in the wine? Thank-you Country Life for organising a fantastic course!

The next day on the way home we stopped off at Black Pearl Winery in Paarl. www.blackpearlwines.com

Here Mary-Lou showed us her cellar–what an inspiration. Though she is too big now to officially be a Garagiste she still makes her wine the same way she did when she had a small production. Little interference, nuturing of the wine into the glass and a lot of passion. Walking into her cellar, the first thing that hits you is the smell of the grapes fermenting, sweet, rich and sticky. She showed  us the containers of crushed grapes fermenting, waiting to be plunged by her personally, they appeared alive and full of energy,masses of little, dark berries doing their thing- one wants to push your bare arms into it , to feel and touch it-become one with it?  Need I say– it was very exciting and we were grinning at each other all the way home thinking about the potential of all this fabulous wine we are going to make.

Getting back we raced off to look at our little vineyard and were terribly disapointed to see  the damage the birds had done was much worse than we had expected. Even though we had put up nets the Mousebirds with their long tails had still managed to take most of our harvest–we would be lucky to get 50 litres. After all this excitement and enthusiam we were not going to be easily defeated and Herman is busy organising 500kg (1/2 ton) of Shiraz, Cab and Merlot grapes from a nearby town from an fellow vine grower that does it on a larger scale. What a lot of winemakers do–so we are busy gearing up to do some Port , Shiraz, Cab, Merlot and Shiraz/Cab blend—It takes a whole year so we don’t want to wait another year to get the process on the go. This way we can try the different grapes and our “method” and see what happens. The sugar level of the grapes should reach it’s level for picking by the weekend so I do forsee next week being taken up with crushing and plunging.

We are thinking of having a Harvest Festival (it takes a lot of beer to make a bit of wine) where we invite all our friends to come help crush,  have a big braai and then next year we can do it again and drink this year’s wine. Sounds like fun!!