As I write this, I’m sipping on some Franciacorta with my love, and we’re planning the day’s cellar activity. One of the great joys of the Wine Life is getting wine out of the bottle. There is a lot of work, though, that goes into getting it into the glass first.
One of the great joys of the wine life is getting wine out of the bottle
The Steven Kent Winery is a very small operation intent on making wine as fine as anywhere in the world. Because our wine mission is centered in the undiscovered country of the Livermore Valley, most of our sales come through wine clubs and out the cellar door. Over the years, as our brands have come and gone, the number of wines we make each year has dropped from about 50 to a more manageable 20 or so. We rent space in a larger winery facility and use some of that winery’s equipment so we do not have complete control over when various tools can be used or when wines can be bottled.
Often, we have to chunk out a big part of wines at one time and get them ready for bottling because spaces on the schedule dry up quickly. Right now we are also facing the advent of harvest - that most glorious time when the grapes control the clock and fermentation takes absolute priority - so this may be the last time until December for us to get wines in bottle. The planning part of this process (the securing of tanks, the scheduling of filtration time, and the like) can take as long as the actual work.
This is how this process works:
Barrels are pulled down from larger stacks (sometimes 6 barrels high) and laid out on the floor in single stacks
Tanks are scrubbed, ozoned, and swabbed to make sure they are immaculately cleaned then filled with Carbon dioxide
The barrels are bulldogged (using nitrogen, wine is propelled by a fill gun from the barrel to the clean tank); this process takes about 3-4 minutes for each barrel
an invaluable training camp for the unending days of harvest that will start in a month
The barrels are then power washed to remove any lees that remain (another 2-3 minutes each; 68 barrels in ten different lots)
A nitrogen cap is fitted to each tank to create a layer of inert gas between the wine and oxygen
The tanks are run through a crossflow filter to insure they are free of bad bugs (bacteria, wild yeast, etc.) and returned to a different clean tank
The crossflowed wine is taken to the bottling line and finally bottled
All 68 barrels are transported outside where they are sulfured so that they are ready to go for new wine from the coming harvest
This week we will have performed the steps outlined above 10 times for 10 different wines. Days start early in the morning and end 10-12 hours. By the end of the week, we will have a slew of new offerings for our club members and an invaluable training camp for the unending days of harvest that will start in a month.