How We Do It
We realize the thought of launching into a 1930's movie western script is awfully tempting. Instead, we are here to talk about how wine is made at Twisted Oak's gravity feed winery.
Here are five 1/2 ton bins laden with Tempranillo harvested from Twisted Oak's Sheep Shack vineyard in Murphys.
(That would be the Sheep Shack in the background.) (Don't ask....)
The bins are brought into the winery and dumped into a hopper which feeds them into a destemmer-crusher machine on the next level. (White wines being whole-cluster pressed will go straight into the press first.)
Here is the crusher-destemmer (or was that the other way round?) in action. Fruit comes in the top, stems come out to the right, berries fall out of the bottom. How cool is that?
For the actual fermentation, we use open-top containers. The smaller lots are fermented in the same bins used for harvesting. Punch-downs are performed by hand several times a day to keep the "cap" moist and the fermentation fresh and active. (The cap is made of the skins which float to the surface.)
Larger lots are fermented in open-top tanks. In a traditional winery the cap is moistened by "pumping-over" the wine from the bottom of the tank. At Twisted Oak, we use a pneumatic punch-down paddle which mimics the action of the hand method. This helps give all of our wines the same hand-crafted taste and aroma.
(And just for the record, Matt also has to do hand punch-downs and Carla gets to use the cool machine - once in a while!)
Before fermentation with white wines, and after fermentation with reds, we press the juice off the skins using a big press that is basically a big leaky cylinder with a bag inside. The bag inflates and squeezes all the juice out through the holes in the cylinder.
Since that is kind of hard to show you, instead we have Scotty making sure the fruit is going in right (in front of appreciative onlookers), and Heather making sure it is all nice and clean!
The pressed juice flows into one of several holding tanks prior to barreling. Note that we put the tops back on the tanks for this, as Fermento ably demonstrates.
From the tanks the wine is stored in French, American, and Hungarian oak barrels in our 300-foot long wine cave.
Our cellar hands really enjoy their work and it seems almost impossible at times to get them out of the cave!
The last step after weeks or months in the barrel is of course - the bottling! We bring in a mobile bottling line, and it is all-hands-on-deck to get the bottling done.
Actually, I lied - the last step is of course when it gets into your glass and you get to enjoy it - with your friends and/or your rubber chicken. As you wish...
