July 30, 2008
Our bulldogs don’t bite. They don’t even bark. What they do is allow us to get wine cleanly out of barrels with out exposing it to oxygen. In this picture, Bernie is using one of our four “pups” to transfer the barrels I designated for the 2007 Carneros Pinot Noir into tank. This process is quite a bit slower than using a conventional pump, but it’s much more gentle on the wine. Compressed nitrogen flows into the top of the barrel via the smaller hose and pushes the wine out through the bottom of the metal “wand” that’s inserted into the bunghole, and from there it flows all the way to the tank.
It took Esteban and Bernie (with Emma washing the barrels after they were emptied) all day on Monday to complete this movement, and the wine ended up in two of our large tanks, because we don’t have a single tank big enough to hold the entire lot. The next day—yesterday as I write this—while the guys repeated this process for the 2007 Wildcat Pinot Noir and 2007 Wildcat Syrah, Emma and I did a “measure move” involving the two original tanks and a third tank to make the Carneros blend totally uniform. The Wildcat wines didn’t require this, as they’re not so large and can easily fit in a single tank.
Bottling begins on Friday with the Wildcat Chardonnay. Next week we’ll bottle the two Wildcat reds, and then move on to finish out the week with the Carneros Pinot Noir. As soon as bottling is complete, Emma will be out (during the week of August 11) to collect our first set of maturity samples for the upcoming harvest. While I don’t think we’ll have grapes anywhere near ready by then, it’s always good to have baseline numbers so that we can watch things progress. She should thereafter be getting new numbers every week, so I’ll keep you posted.
-Kevin Holt
