Stuart Ake: Have you ever wondered how sparkling wine is made? Today we’re going to make that journey from vineyard all the way to the bubbles in the bottle as we walk through each step of the sparkling wine making process. Right now, one of our two vineyards that we’re sourcing from the 2009 harvest went to pieces vineyard in the Sonoma coast sourcing Pinot Noir for the Blanc de noirs. Aside that it corporate some biodynamic principles, sustainable practices in the vineyard, beautiful site in the Petaluma Gap area. What I like about this part of the Sonoma Coast is there’s a geologic formation on the coast which funnels the fogs in everyday, cooling the temperatures. It can be about 15 degrees cooler than other parts of the valley.
In the afternoon, when that fog pushes in, shots the vine down almost makes them dormant so we could preserve that acidity.
After harvesting the fruit, we’re going to head up to Rock and Riddle a sparkling wine production facility in Mendocino County.
Still from crush pad, let’s make some bubbles.
Crush pad is never been able to make sparkling wine before because it requires some very specialize equipment but now we’re working with the facility known for their sparkling wine production capabilities so you can make your very own bubbly.
And this is where it all happens. We are on the crush pad of Rock and Riddle up in Mendocino County. I am with Penny Gadd-Coaster, our winemaker for this special project. We’ve been, you know over the years, people are been asking us, is this the year you’re going to be making sparkling. Is this the year that we’re going to be making sparkling and this is the year that we’re going to be making sparkling wine. What Penny is going to do is walk us through each step of the sparkling process. So we can get an overview of what is going to be like one from on the grapes come in until they end up in bottle ready for drinking.
Penny: Rafael gets the grapes here and then we take over. Now, what you’ve just seen our grapes after they come out of the field and are being dump into a press for a whole cluster pressing. From here, some of the juice free wine juice will run out into a sump and this juice since then moving into and take inside that’s very cold. Its about 50 degrees, pretty soon we will be actually pressing this grapes but it goes through a series of cycles that allows most of the juice just to kind of be lightly squeeze out of the berries.
So we’re going actually into this tank right here. Once our juice gets rock into another tank, what we will do is we add a little bit of yeast to it while a little bit nutrients to it. Make it really happy and it will serve fermenting. That will take about a week to a week and a half. We want to try to do as really slowly especially with Pinot, there are some early wonderful flavors that come out in the Pinot grapes and kind of the cooler that you do them the more those flavors and aromas will come out.
From the tanks and after it goes into the bottle, it goes on Tirage that’s kind of a time where the fermentation takes place and that takes about a month to a month and a half. From there, once it does finish that fermentation process then it has to go through a Riddling process.
Generally, that’s anywhere from six months after I finish it up fermentation to it could be 10 or 20 years whatever that products more is. The riddling process takes about five to seven days.
This is then where the next process takes place after it’s all been riddled. It’s actually loaded into a tray that has white cool water in it but it actually freezes the next. What will happen is it will freeze to about here and then is all travel along they’re freezing, they’re freezing. Now travel along and then they’ll be put upright on to the tray and then go through the next piece of the equipment that actually holds the cap off that frozen plug actually flies out of the bottle to upright again goes through this next piece of equipment three times.
The first time around that holds a little bit of wine out, the second time around it put the dosage which is a sugar mixture that does help the kind of balance out your wine and then it goes around one more time it brings it up to 750 mills which is where all bottles should be filled at and then from there, it goes into the corking process and the wire hood and the caps on and the labels.
These are some bottles that were actually just putting through the line to kind of find to the packaging, it’s a bit tough to not only get the caps on and get it pleaded, pretty so all matches up with your front label but also to make sure that everything is lined up properly.
Stuart Ake: What a beautiful day. Start it off with two pieces, pick some Pinot rather up here to our new partner Rock and Riddle really, really exciting. It’s great to go with Penny from each step of the sparkling process. I know we’re going to be making some really good wine this year, Stay tuned.
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