Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/246577
TIM PATTERSON Inquiring Winemaker The Downside of a Cleaner, Gentler Crush Pad I n winemaking, as in so much of life, it's possible to have too much of a good thing. A bumper crop in the vineyard is great, but over-cropped vines make lousy wine. Warmth is a fine thing for fermenting and extracting red grapes, but crank that must up to 110º F and your Petit Verdot will get deep-fried. Integrated oak is a good thing; egregious oak is a bad thing. In that spirit, it's time to ask whether fruit can be too clean and crushing too gentle. Crush pads across the land are sporting more and more sophisticated equipment designed to deliver perfect berries to the ferment: shaking sorting tables that eliminate every leaf, fruit fly and stray jack, optical scanner-sorters that expel any berry deemed unfit, destemmers that don't actually knock berries loose with paddles but rather calmly persuade them to self-deport from their pedicles. The War Against MOG has gone high-tech: Robots and drones may be on the way. The aim of all this kinder, gentler, cleaner processing is maximizing the fruit character of the eventual wine and minimizing what seem like extraneous influences, and it's hard to argue • ecent advances in R against that. Make wine from crush pad technology— the fruits of the vineyard, not the destemming, sorting, detritus. It's a perfectly plausible goal; nobody wants to make crushing—have made the wine from grape leaves and gum process much cleaner and wrappers and earwigs, and many gentler. Maybe too clean winemakers are further deterand too gentle? mined to banish anything that might smack of those dreaded • igorous sorting of wholeR "green" flavors and to quaranberry fruit may result tine the allegedly nasty influin higher alcohol, lower ences of grape seeds. Sure acidity, higher pH and enough, squeaky-clean fruit diminished complexity in makes super-fruity wine. the resulting wine. But is that what this wine thing is all about? Fruit juice and alco• ew research illuminates N hol? Is it possible that the varithe amazing diversity ous forms of junk that go into of grapevine microbial the hopper along with the grapes populations and their add something to the character importance to wine quality. of wine? If everybody's grapes get cleaner and cleaner, will their Highlights 28 W in e s & V i ne s F E B R UARY 20 14 The crush pad at Conn Creek Winery in St. Helena, Calif., includes a destemmer, sorting table, optical sorter and Pellenc grape centrifuge. wines taste more and more similar? Does a distinctive wine with flavors other than pure fruit maybe need a little material other than grapes in its pedigree? Technology and terroir I had been ruminating about this for a while when Wines & Vines staff writer Andrew Adams steered me to an article in the Napa Valley Register about the high-tech crush pad technology being deployed at Conn Creek Winery in St. Helena, Calif. The setup included a gentle destemmer, a sorting table to get rid of MOG and a Bucher Vaslin optical sorter that identifies suspect fruit with a 10 million-pixel camera and then uses targeted puffs of air to jettison under-ripe/moldy/raisined losers. And as a final step, the glistening berries go into a Pellenc grape centrifuge, with which it is possible to dial in the proportion of berries that get cracked open by the spinning pressure and the proportion that stay intact at the start of fermentation.