Friday, February 17, 2006

Valentine's day, Vilafonte 2006, Tuesday

Sorting in photos:
I talked about sorting on Friday but photos are the best way to demonstrate, short of being on the sorting line (hard work, long days). So here are some photos showing the process and results.
#1 As grapes go into destemmer, the first sort post vineyard
#2 This is what is taken out from this first sort
#3 This is what is removed immediately after the destemmer. Notice the number of pieces of stems that come through. No matter how good a stemmer wehave, nor how well or cannily it is run, I have never seen a destemmer that doesn't send some of those undesirable green stem pieces through.
#4 We have 6-7 people doing this final sort, removing raisins, and lighter grapesprimarily although still removing some green matter
#5 This is what they take out
#6 Nice, clean, purple grapes falling into the fermenter. The amount removed is not large in either weight or volume, but it is important to remove. And consider, most of the leaves that are accidentally picked are removed from the bins while still in the vineyard. So the grapes come in pretty clean, and we are "perfecting" them, at the rate of about 1 ton/hour. These are photos of Block Z Merlot, that should produce a rich, dense Merlot.
Zelma Long

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