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86 W i n e s & V i n e s n O V e M B e R 2 0 1 4 Everything from the light fixtures in the tasting room to the floor of the tank room is of the highest quality. The Hamels would not disclose the amount of their total investment in the winery but say it was in line with what they were budgeting. Gentle processing for whole berries John Hamel says all of the crush pad equipment was sourced through P&L Specialties with a primary goal of gentle processing to preserve whole berries for fermentation. Grapes are handpicked and delivered in small, 40-pound bins so that none of the grapes at the bottom of the bins are crushed. The bins are dumped onto a sort- ing table that leads to an elevator, which takes the grapes to a Delta E1 Destemmer. After they are destemmed, the grapes run through a Le Trieur sorter before hitting another shaker table for further sorting. Sorted berries fall into stainless steel sumps, which a forklift operator then lifts and dumps into the tanks. "I mean you can make arguments all day about what actually will break up the fruit more— dropping it from a certain height prob- ably damages it to a certain extent, but we try to be as gentle as possible," John Hamel says. "Everything is (moved by) gravity, and generally our wines will only see a pump during fermentation." Most of the tanks at the winery were custom made by Santa Rosa Stainless Steel and feature dual jackets, built-in pump-over tubes and irrigators. When everything is filled and fermenting, John Hamel says running pump overs will be as simple as moving a Yamada air pump from tank to tank. In addition to the stainless steel tanks, Hamel Family Wines also uses concrete fermentation tanks and eggs by Nomblot. With a brand new winery, John Hamel says he'd like to ferment with the ambient or "native" yeasts, but he has the resources should that prove ineffective. After a cold soak of a few days, John Hamel says he can warm the tanks up to see if that starts fermentation or just add yeast. "We're going to try and do every- thing native, but basically if it's not going we'll inoculate. We're not dogmatic about it," he says. "When you're not inoculat- ing, your best bet for getting things going is to have good temperature control, and each one of these tanks is made for that." The concrete tanks by Nomblot couldn't be bolted to the floor to meet seismic stan- dards, so the Hamels had custom concrete cradles built for the tanks so that they could shake in place and not topple over. The concrete tanks are a new direction that John Hamel feels will fit the winemaking program quite well. "We do a lot of barrel fermentations as well, and concrete was something in between wood and stainless steel," he says. "We're pretty excited about it. We've put a big investment into it, but from our research and people we talk to, people have been pretty happy with the results. It gives us another tool in the winery to get where we need to go." For barrel fermentations, John Hamel says he removes the barrelhead, fills each barrel with grapes and uses OxO racks for rolling the barrels to break up the cap during fermentation. Once red lots are done fermenting, the free run drains directly to barrels for aging or into smaller portable tanks that can be lifted with a forklift for gravity- powered barrel filling. John Hamel says that before pressing he will leave the Cab- ernet on its skins for up to two months to give the wine more structure and to bal- ance the fruity flavors of whole-berry fer- mentation. "You're getting bright, really fresh fruit flavors, so we use extended maceration to add a little backbone and structure so that you're getting that fresh- ness but you're also getting the depth and structure of the tannins you want." The Hamels have a JLB 5 press by Bucher Vaslin for reds. John Hamel admits it is a bit small, but he keeps nearly every George F. Hamel III, center, helps sort Sauvignon Blanc grapes during the 2014 harvest. The whole clusters are pressed with a Puleo SF-22 press. A Nomblot concrete egg is framed in the winery cave by an alcove that features an exposed rock wall. The eggs are used for white wine fermentation. bruce damonTe G R A P E G R O W I N G W I N E M A K I N G TECHNICAL REVIEW