Punch down the cap - How to pige wine

Pigeage is more than just a funny word with indecipherable vowel distribution. It's a way of life. For weeks, all of our wines are going through an extended fermentation where the grapes and grape juice are turning into delicious red wine. This is a critical period known as maceration when the wine will draw its best qualities from the skin and the seeds in the tank. The undamaged grapes of harvest time impart their best qualities to the juice which will one day soon be fine wine.

But it's not smooth sailing, my friends. The tanks we hold the grapes in contain 80 to 100 hectoliters (converted to nonmetric: a lot) of grapes. And the pristine purple marbles that fall into the vat are crushed and torn asunder by the chemical forces at work when yeasts ferment the juice. What's more, there's a byproduct to all this fermenting: CO2. The Carbon dioxide rises to the top of the vat like bubbles in soda and they will lift the majority of the skin and seeds to the top, forming a thick hard cap.

Two or three times a day depending on where we are in the fermentation (determined by measuring the density and temperature of the wine in the cuve). This is hard. It's a struggle to push the grapes back down into the juice. Especially the first time. Especially the first hole. That first puncture is rough, but we've gotta' do it!

I've been looking for excuses to push back the daily pigeage ritual to give my tired arms a rest. My finely tuned ability to procrastinate led me to make a video about pigeing. And now, in an effort to avoid the afternoon pige, I'm writing a blog post about pigeing.

Now you can learn the ins and outs. See the tools I use. Learn the theory and strategies that I usually ignore. You too can use this blog post as a way to not do the work you should probably be doing right now.

Behold punch downs:

Wine punch down - Pigeage

oh, music by Phunt Your Friends available for free download at songfight.org

Taste Merlot before harvest to check maturity

I have a new video for you all. This is a little video that describes how we go about tasting the grapes to decide whether or not they're almost ready to harvest. You all know how to taste things, so it's a little basic. However, sometimes, it's fun to hear about the specifics like ... what exactly does tasting the seed show about acidity and maturity or ... how do you go about randomly picking grapes for a 200 berry sample that you'll bring to the lab.

Yes, these and far nerdier questions will be answered.


Tasting Merlot before Harvest

Pre-emptive Q & A:

Q: Ryan, isn't it a little late in the year to be checking your grapes' maturity? I thought that the Cabardes would have harvested most of its Merlot by now.
A: You are such a precocious reader! Yes, it's true that this is late. I filmed this in September and then got too busy actually harvesting to edit the video (also, I had to debug it because iMovie HD was giving me some trouble).


Q: How about a harvest update?
A: Harvest is going well. The Merlot and Syrah are in and they're fermenting. We just started punching down caps today on two of the vats and it's as hard as I remember. There's a new harvester that is amazing so our quality will go up even though we are harvesting a little less by hand this year. That's awesome, because it means less stress for me and better wine for all of us. :)