Preparing the Grapes

I wanted to finish off the blog about my walk in the vineyard before doing today's blog.  We got up early and drove this time up to the top of the vineyard where some of the previous pictures were taken. They were actually starting to pick the grapes although it was quite far over and across the vineyard so I wasn't able to get pictures of the workmen but as we were leaving a tractor rumbled by so we followed it to the building where they make the wine. The first picture is of the tractor and in front of it is a stainless steel machine that he tips the grapes into and this little machine takes the grapes off their stems. Kinda neat. The stems come out the back and the grapes fall down into a bucket where they are screwed into a long hose that transports them to the stainless steel tanks in the shed. What most people don't realize is that the juice of almost all grapes is actually white NOT red. The red colour comes from pigments in the skin of the grapes. The grapes are crushed by this little machine as well and then pumped in these big stainless steel vats. This winery leaves the grapes with their skins and seed and bits of stems that survive the first step to sit in these tanks for a period of time where the red from the skin then colours the wine juice and and a whole pile of other natural chemicals ( Tannins etc) are brought into the wine before they separate everything out to start the fermentation process.  What amazed me is how small everything is at this winery. I have this impression of these huge machines that are set up to do all the work but this place is rather compact and it processes the entire vineyard across the way from us. I don't know how much wine they make here but there a better than a dozen big stainless tanks which I'm sure holds quite a bit of juice. Everyone is temperature controlled so much of the guessing from way back when is now eliminated and I'm sure they have a much higher success ratio.

I tasted the grapes while in the vineyard and they were very sweet but actually did not have a lot of taste to them. And they are full of seeds so difficult to enjoy. I didn't care because it is the end product that I'm consuming a lot of on this trip NOT the product at the beginning.

Ciao.