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Paso Robles TECHNICAL REVIEW WINEMAKING San Luis Obispo County CA L IF O RLuis A San N I Obispo Pismo Beach Santa Maria Santa Barbara County Margerum Wine Co. Santa Barbara Pacific Ocean Margerum's interest in small-batch fermentations is made possible by an ample supply of small, variable-capacity stainless tanks ranging in size from 300 to 1,000 liters. Margerum is particularly fond of one feature of his Della Toffola press: Its pressure bag is in the center of the press tank, not on one side, which means equal pressure on all the contents and a thinner layer of must getting pressed. In fact, Margerum suggested I not tell anyone about this press, for fear others would adopt it, too. Yeast choices are the subject of ongoing discussions at Margerum, though nothing too exotic comes into play. Jason Barrette noted that the giant Penfolds winery uses a single yeast strain, AWRI 796, selected by the Australian Wine Research Institute, on all its reds, from supermarket staples to the Grange. Margerum goes a little wider than that, but the choices are industry favorites, chosen for their performance characteristics. One corner of the facility is a very basic lab, perfectly serviceable for running Brix, TA, pH and sulfur dioxide tests over and over. More advanced testing, including for malolactic completion, gets farmed out to one of two local service labs. The winery wish list includes something like an Ventura County Enofoss analyzer, which would increase the number of parameters that could be tested as well as the throughput. Margerum does not do routine YAN testing but does standard nutrient additions. Keeping track of all these batches and all these numbers is currently handled, says Barrette, with "a pencil and a piece of paper," though wine-tracking software is somewhere on the horizon. Doug Margerum is a partisan of French oak, period. Coopers represented on the barrel racks include François Frères, Ermitage (for the Rhone program), Taransaud (for the Happy Canyon Bordeaux varieties) and Gamba (for the Italianate wines). Given the prominence of small lots, it's Margerum's tanks that show more personality. Among the oldest are two blending tanks, Fat Man and Tall Man, and one named Rick Longoria—a tank borrowed several years back from that Santa Barbara winemaker by someone else, who then loaned it to Margerum, and here it still sits. S U P P O RT R E S E A R C H & W I N E I N D U S T RY N E E D S T H R OUG H T H E AMERICAN VINEYARD FOUNDATION Finding Solutions Through Research For a wealth of useful viticulture and enology research and information, visit AVF.org, iv.ucdavis.edu, enologyaccess.org, or ngwi.org. AMERICAN VINEYARD FOUNDATION P.O. Box 5779, Napa, CA., 94581 • T: (707) 252-6911 • Email info@avf.org. Visit our Web site at www.avf.org for information on funding and current research projects 50 WI NE S & VI NE S O CTOBE R 20 13 Ojai CALIFORNIA Santa Luc