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If you’ve never been in a winery when the fruit comes in, it’s an exhilarating experience. Before the grapes arrive, teams clean and sanitize all equipment, ensure fermentation bins are ready to be filled, and align on the plan for that particular batch. For white wine, grapes go straight from the sorting table to the press. For red, the grapes head from the sorting table to the fermentation bins. If winemakers want to de-stem, that setup must be ready in the middle of it all.
With so many winemaking options and varied styles produced in Oregon, the winemaker acts as the director, ensuring everyone knows the plan amid the excitement.
By the end of harvest, fruit has been arriving for six weeks, filling the winery with fermenting bins and barrels that all need to be punched down, pumped over, or foot trodden (more on this next week!). So, in addition to processing the new fruit, the team has to care for everything from the previous days, ramping up the workload. Now you see why everyone is exhausted by the end!
So by the time us nocturnal restaurant folks moseyed in at the grim hour of 9 am, Grant, Renée, and their two amazing 2024 vineyard hands had already completed punchdowns on nearly all the fermenters, set up and sanitized the processing equipment, topped up barrels, and made a game plan for the day. (I wanted to ask what time they’d woken up, but I was afraid of the answer!)
When the Gamay arrived—delivered by a contracted vineyard team who did the laborious picking—Renée hopped on the forklift and deftly zoomed the fruit over to the sorting table, and we were off to the races.
They let us operate the sorting table slide (similar to the back of a dump truck, allowing for a steady flow of fruit onto the table), which was very exciting for us city slickers. Then we got our delicate hands dirty sorting out leaves, twigs, and more than a few earwigs. This particular batch of grapes was in beautiful shape, and we hardly had to sort any clusters out—which is rare! Once roughly sorted, the first batch of fruit traveled up the ladder and straight into the bin for whole-cluster fermentation.
Next, Grant rolled in the de-stemmer—an impressive machine that tumbles the grape clusters and separates the berries from the stems—between the sorting table and fermentation bin for the remaining three batches.
So when a winery says the wine is 25% whole cluster, this can be what they mean: all fermented in one bin, but 25% of the fruit was not de-stemmed. Alternatively, it could also mean they were fermented separately and blended together after.
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