This photo shows Damien, his basket press, Joe(bar) and Jen (2nd sommelier).The monty has been on skins for 4 weeks now. By leaving the wine on skins for so long our goal was to try and extract maximum potential tannins from the skins and seeds. Tannin structure is very important to me as a sommelier, as I believe tannins not only provide structure to wines but also carry and help integrate wine and food flavours when eating.
Tannin build up and mouth-feel of the wine was closely observed throughout the post-fermentation maceration process as excess extraction of harsh tannins (especially at high alcohol levels) can lead to hard wines. Therefore once the ferment had finished, the wine was left on skins and the skins were hand plunged once per week.
Tannin build up and mouth-feel of the wine was closely observed throughout the post-fermentation maceration process as excess extraction of harsh tannins (especially at high alcohol levels) can lead to hard wines. Therefore once the ferment had finished, the wine was left on skins and the skins were hand plunged once per week.
Here you can see Joe and I hand filling the basket press with the monty wine and skins prior to pressing. This was the first time I had experience using a basket press and the first time I had the opportunity of making the call when to stop pressing. When you press a red wine, the initial wine that comes out of the skins at low pressing pressure contains less tannins than the later wine that is being forced out of the skin-marc. It was very challenging to make the call when to make the press-cut, i.e. when to stop pressing the marc because the monty was already undergoing malolactic fermentation (malo) which gives the wine a milky flavour and can not be too sure how the structure of the wine will change as malic acid is converted to lactic. Type in malo in "search this blog" at the top of the home page to find more info malo.
After filling our selected four year old, francois frere barrel (225L) we let the wine settle and had a good old german barbie with knack-wurst, sauerkraut and kartofelsalat. The above photo shows Damien syphoning James off a sample of the monty. Boy, where we all stoked with how things were looking. The plan from now; let the wine stay on gross lees (dead yeast cells etc) in the barrle until the naturally occuring malo has finished, then we'll rack the wine off the gross lees, sulfur her up and let evaporation and tannin polymerisation do the rest.
