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TECHNICAL SPOTLIGHT WINEMAKING August 2018 WINES&VINES 49 All grapes are hand-harvested. "All of our fermentations are whole-berry, and mechanical harvesting breaks up the berries quite a bit," Giacomelli said. "As soon as those berries break, the juice is exposed to oxygen and a wild microbial population, both good and bad, thus beginning the fermentation process. We'd rather maintain control over that aspect." Grapes are collected into half-ton macro- bins, then forklifted onto a slow-moving escala- tor and sorted by hand as they move into the Bucher Vaslin Delta Oscyllis destemmer — a destemmer that swings the cage, applying a gentle, gradual force to separate stems and berries. The grapes are then gravity-fed back onto a sorting table for another round of man- ual sorting. "We're actually hand-sorting twice, which is a really different way of making wine," Lisa Mazzoni said. "We process our fruit a lot slower, about 1 ton per half-hour." While the Cabernet grapes are stripped of stems completely, Zinfandel lots contain about 5% whole-cluster inclusion, "to include a bit of backbone," Giacomelli said. Grapes are dumped directly from the sorter into the concrete tanks to undergo initial fer- mentation. Giacomelli said he and Mark Maz- zoni use a combination of native and inoculated yeast — D254 for Cabernet and Clos for Zinfan- del. "We want to move toward entirely native," Giacomelli said. "We have an open screen, vine- yard air and yeast flowing in all the time, so ideally we'd have our own 'house yeast.'" But it can be a little risky to do 100% native fermentation straight-away, he said, so for the past two vintages he and Mark Mazzoni inocu- lated half the wines with commercial yeast and let half ferment on their own. "Things went really well last year, so this year we'll probably try to do seven or eight batches of native," Gia- comelli said. The red wines ferment for about two to four weeks in the concrete tanks with twice daily punchdowns, pumpovers or rack and returns. Once initial fermentation is complete, Mazzoni and Giacomelli pump the free-run wine directly into oak barrels, with each tank filling about five to six barrels. Zialena's wines are aged in a mixture of new and neutral French oak barrels, using varying toast levels from Artisan, Ermitage, Taransaud and Radoux cooperages. "Ninety- nine percent of our barrels are neutral because we don't want to mask the grapes," Giacomelli said. "We like to work with the same coopers, but experiment with the different toast levels and forests ... to build up 'the spice rack' and have those blending tools." Pomace from the fermentation tanks goes into the Bucher Vaslin JLB Automated Basket Press. "This basket press is so incredibly gentle, the pressed juices almost taste like free-run," Gia- comelli said. Those pressed juices are barreled and aged separately for potential blending. Red wine ages 20 to 24 months at Zialena, with regular stirring once every two weeks. Once the wines are ready, Mazzoni and Giaco- melli conduct blending trials in the winery's lab facility — where they also test other data during the winemaking process such as pH, acidity, alcohol, sulfur dioxide and volatile acidity. "We're actually hand- sorting twice, which is a really different way of making wine." —Lisa Mazzoni