If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know we have finally amassed enough winemaking equipment and knowledge that we have a system. It’s not always pretty; it’s seldom elegant. But we can get grapes from the fields, through crushing/destemming in less than an hour and from primary fermentation through pressing and into secondary fermentation in less than two. Ah, yes, we have our system and it’s almost scientific. It worked for the Cinsault, the Grenache and the Mourvedre. Then there was the Cabernet. The teeny, tiny yield of Cabernet. So teeny tiny a yield that dragging out all those hoses and pieces of equipment and instrumentation just didn’t seem to make sense. So we went back to the Stone Age. Or at least the age when old Italian men crushed wine in their basements in their wives’ washtubs and with old oars from rowboats to stir it.
As you can see above, rather than set up our elaborate hose system, we defaulted to the old Bail and Pour Method of getting the macerated grapes out of the primary fermentation vats and into the press.
Didn’t Martha Stewart say a full set of Pyrex measuring pitchers would always come in handy?
So maybe we didn’t revert all the way back to the Stone Age, because we did wheel the new press out to squeeze and separate the juice from the wine skins.
And let the wine flow. Minus the skins and seeds.
It’s young, but at this stage, you can call it wine.
Now another piece of high-tech equipment. Yes, it’s the plastic funnel:
Kids, don’t try this without terrier supervision.
The whole sad little operation, glass carboys and all.
The only consolation: it’s actually tasting pretty good, even at this early stage. So when we are drinking our first Cabernet, will we even remember the humiliation of having so little that we had to process it the Barney Rubble Way?
A bit jejeune, but with a certain je ne sais quoi. And a back note of terrier fur.
And speaking of the two terriers of Two Terrier Vineyards, it seems they will emit uninterrupted, ear-piercing shrieks during the whole process — even if there is no noisy machinery.
Our fearless leaders. Now you know what we mean when we say: “Our wine’s special flavor? It’s the terroir.”
