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TonnellerieDeJarnac_Dir10 11/11/09 3:40 PM Page 1 COVER STORY Handcrafted & Authentic Contact: Yannick Rousseau Tel: (707) 332 4524 • Fax: (707) 224 8734 Email: yannickrousseau@sbcglobal.net Website: www.tonnellerie-de-jarnac-16.com "People, Product, Profit Without top people, you cannot do much with the others." - Malcolm Forbes WWW.RECRUITINGASSOCIATESNETWORK.COM Tel: 707-931-4707 822 College Avenue, Ste. B, Santa Rosa, CA 95404 Discover the Difference of Our Specialized Services: It's Our Niche It's Our Network It's Our Approach It's Our Guarantee! Long Shadows winemaker Gilles Nicault (left) and partner-winemaker Philippe Melka make good use of a large barrel—tasting their wines. Dearden admits, "They can be dangerous. There's a lot of risk. They're like a Ferrari: Great performance, but you need to treat them with a lot of care." He stored them empty. After using, he cleaned them out scrupulously of lees and tartrates, dried them thoroughly, kept them full of SO2 and treated them with ozone before harvest. "We didn't have TCA and didn't use chlorine in the winery," he says, adding that ETS Laboratories has cheap tests for TCA. He kept Brettanomyces at bay with careful sanitation. Oak tanks at Vineyard 29 At boutique producer Vineyard 29 in St. Helena, Calif., winemaker Keith Emerson uses seven 75-hectoliter Radoux fermentors for the winery's estate Cabernet. In the eight years he's been at the winery, he has bought two new ones and sold two old ones each year to renew his stock. The vats contain internal stainless steel screens to exclude seeds and stems. They also have heat-transfer plates with hot and cold glycol to maintain temperature during fermentation. Emerson says that the oak fermentors round out the intensity and feel of the tannins. "They give a rounder texture than stainless steel," he says. He also finds they ferment wines cooler, leading to a long extraction: 30 days and sometime longer. "Even after all that time in a new tank, the wines aren't oaky," he says. 32 W in es & V i ne s F E B R UARY 20 13