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WINEMAKING Steps toward a reserve winery Gentle, meticulous processing In 2005, Stambor said the winery first started experimenting with small-batch winemaking and set up a line for sorting and processing fruit received in Macro Bins. He said they used 1,600-gallon, open-top stainless steel tanks, into which gently processed, hand-sorted fruit was dumped directly. Cellar staff managed the fermentations with a pneumatic punch-down device on a rail above the tanks. The wine received some extended maceration before it was pressed in a small basket press. That first vintage was a pilot program of around 100 tons to help the winemaking team get an idea of how they'd want to set up a small reserve winery. Stambor said they learned it was possible to treat The Georges de Latour Private Reserve Winery is housed in a former barrel warehouse. The building located on the edge of BV's winemaking complex has a modest, nondescript exterior that belies the top-ofthe-line winemaking equipment it houses. Assistant winemaker Elizabeth DeLouiseGrant handles day-to-day operations at the winery. She joined BV in 1999. The winery project included changing the floor grades and eliminating trench drains as well as installing a new "stateof-the-art" HVAC system. Stambor said the system offers floating dew points and whole-building air exchange. The winery also is equipped with an Airocide UV airpurifying system for microbial control. View video in the Wines & Vines Digital Edition. After getting some tips from the staff at Beaulieu Vineyard, the winemaking team at Crew Wine Co. in Zamora, Calif., developed their own system for barrel fermentation. There are four fermentation channels within the winery: stainless steel, French oak vats, French oak barrels and concrete. Most of the grapes are destined for one of the 20 stainless steel tanks custom designed by the Paul Mueller Co. The tanks have a capacity of about 7 tons, making Grapes are sorted by hand, and those designated for barrel fermentation are dropped directly into barrels with some dry ice. grapes with too light of a touch. "When you put fruit through a must pump and hundreds of feet of must line, you get a certain amount of skin breakage that accelerates the extraction process," he said. "But if you remove the must pump and all that must line, and the skins never see a pump, you're still trying to be very gentle, but it's almost to a fault." The staff at BV followed that first year with more tinkering and experimentation in 2006 and 2007, gaining a good idea of what exactly they wanted in a small-lot system. "For the 2008 vintage we took some of the lessons from the first smalllot setup and designed this standalone facility," Stambor said. It was a fortuitous decision to move ahead at the time. A year later the recession had begun, and Stambor and Aiken admit it would have been hard to get a new winery funded. Yet if they had started earlier, they may not have installed exactly the equipment they eventually wanted and needed. Grapes are brought on trucks to the front of the building, where two sorting lines are set up during the harvest. Stambor said the winery is equipped to handle grapes collected in Macro Bins as well as lug boxes. Grapes are dumped from bins onto a short shaker table, and the fruit is sorted by hand before getting destemmed with a Bucher Vaslin Delta EI. Grapes then move through a Le Trieur shaker table that leads to a longer, 12-foot sorting line before getting "popped" by a crusher. The box line is similar except for a cleated, elevated belt leading to the destemmer. Depending on the quality of the fruit, Stambor said they might dose with up to 50ppm sulfur dioxide. He said he does not add any oak or enzymes. Processed grapes are collected into bins that are then dumped with a forklift into the concrete and oak tanks. Grapes meant for barrel fermentation are not crushed but drop directly into barrels after traveling along the final sorting line. them the smallest of all of BV's primary fermentors and storage tanks. Since installing the new, smaller tanks, Stambor said he's been able to pick more selectively. "We found differences in the blocks but weren't able to keep them separate until we had the capabilities here," he said. Being able to pick just certain areas of vineyards also enables Stambor to conduct a more uniform harvest. Computer-controlled fermentation Control is at the heart of the reserve winery. A central computer system designed by Calmetrics in Sacramento, Calif., controls each of the stainless steel tanks. The system operates pumps mounted near the bottom of each tank that runs pump overs. The winemaking staff can set the desired pump-over length and duration for each stage of fermentation. Stambor said pump overs are a key way to manage temperature during fermentation. "If you move the juice frequently enough, you flatten out those variations in Win es & Vi n es A PRI L 20 13 33