More on winemaking...
Further to my posts on “Winemaking 101” and “Wine making update”, yesterday, we (plus our friends from Il Rifugio who are helping us in our experiment!) went shopping for some more accessories. We still haven’t purchased a stainless steel vat with inflatable sealed lid, but we did manage to buy a pigiatrice (the grape masher minus the de-stemmer), a 100L plastic tub (to capture mashed juice and a new oak barrel.
Some people say that if you want the oak flavour in your red wine, you can’t use the barrel more than twice and the standard size of these barrels seems to be 220L (which we’re not sure we’d fill at this point). French oak also seems quite pricey. Initial investigations showed these barrels to cost around 2000 euro.
We found a smaller (58L) barrel in French oak for 220 euro and were told because of the greater surface area of oak to wine in the smaller barrel, we wouldn’t have to leave it in as long and instead of buying two barrels, the helpful man at the Consulente Enologica said we could fill it once and let it age for 6 months (leaving the rest in the airtight vat). Bottle the first batch and then repeat with the leftovers, except maybe age it for 8 months for the second lot as some of the ‘oakiness’ will have been absorbed by the first batch.
Being sensible shoppers, we tried another supply store and found a 100L oak barrel for 134 euro which we snapped up. It didn’t look as well made and we’re almost positive it’s not French oak, but hey, we’re not making Brunello here!
We think a 100L stainless steel vat, with a lid that has an inflatable ring around it that sits on the surface of the wine to keep the air out, will cost about 230 euro but then, if we’ll probably have another 30-35% more volume than that with the skins and pulp that will eventually get squeezed out. Confused? Me too!
So, to recap:
- We pick the grapes in the next couple of weeks once the sugar level gets to about 22 degrees (which will theoretically yield a 13.5% alcohol level post fermentation)
- We hand pluck the grapes off the stems because we didn’t get a destemmer. We have just had another couple of friends volunteer to help so between the six of us, it shouldn’t take too long.
- We crush the grapes through the mangle (pigiatrice) which looks to me like an oversized mincer and capture the juice in the big plastic vat (nicely sterilised with soda & high pressure cleaners before hand).
- The juice then gets put into the stainless steel vat (if we’re aiming for about a 100L of wine, we will need a bigger vat to carry the volume in skins, seeds, pulp & juice)
- With a bit of yeast to assist fermentation, the mashed up grapes sit in the vat for about a fortnight (or until the sugar content goes down to zero)
- The whole thing goes through the press and captured in the plastic tub again. This, I’m told, requires a delicate touch; press too hard, and the wine becomes too tanniny and will taste awful; press too lightly, and you won’t get the lovely colour from the skins and not enough tannin in the wine (meaning we’d have to add it after).
- Back into the vat to settle the sediment out (my understanding of the guy was a little fuzzy here, but I think he said about a month) and this is where the airtight lid starts getting used so the wine doesn’t go off.
- Wine then goes into the barrel for 6-8 months (maybe even longer) before bottling. We’ll have to clean the barrel thoroughly before using it (more soda and water). The barrel also needs to be soaked in water before hand to make the oak swell and the barrel watertight (molto importante!). Throughout the waiting period, the wine needs to be topped up (as it gets absorbed by the oak) to keep the barrel full. There’s a device Leonardo da Vinci invented that supposedly automates this by keeping a reserve of liquid outside the barrel that can be used as the pressure inside the barrel drops but I’m not entirely certain of the function or the name - if we end up buying one, I’ll let you know!
