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38 WINES&VINES June 2015 WINERY & VINEYARD EQUIPMENT 38 WINES&VINES June 2015 C ontinuum Estate winery in Napa Valley is the lat- est chapter in the continuing saga of the Mondavi winemak- ing family. Siblings Tim and Marcia Mondavi started the Continuum business in 2005 using proceeds from the sale of the Robert Mondavi Win- ery to Constellation Brands. The winery, which will be focused on small-lot produc- tion of estate fruit, combines traditional winemaking and sustainability with the latest processing equipment. Eventually, the winery will boast one tank per vineyard block, but not all of the vines are pro- ducing, and for now the winery is using some older tanks brought from previous winemaking projects and quarter-ton bins to ferment some of the blocks. After careful field selection that removes unwanted grapes, stems and leaves, the optimum clusters and berries are picked into bins that are dumped with a P&L Specialties bin dumper onto a Bucher Vaslin TBE 800 vibra- tory sorting table, along which workers provide another round of hand sorting. The sorted clusters are then destemmed with an Armbruster Rotovib Model #10, and the individual berries undergo more sort- ing on another Bucher Vaslin vibratory table. After a light crushing to crack the berries, the juice and grapes flow by grav- ity into tanks for fermentation. All of the fermentation tanks are either made of oak (75%) or concrete (25%) in the shape of truncated cones. The only stain- less steel tanks are used for rack-and-return processing to get the wine off seeds and other un- wanted deposits, and for blending. The concrete tanks from Sonoma Cast Stone and Nomblot are of similar size and shape to the oak tanks from Taransaud and Foudrerie Francois. The tanks are of different sizes to match individual blocks of grapes, and they all include cool- ing coils—those in the concrete tanks being embedded in the walls, while those in the oak tanks attach to the interior walls. The refrigeration system is from Refrig- eration Technology. The vessels each have temperature sensors at four levels, and the conditions are monitored via computer sys- tems that winemakers can access remotely. They can also remotely control pump overs and cooling or heating. Permanent pipes allow purging with carbon dioxide, argon or nitrogen (the latter generated onsite). The tanks have large open- ings in the tops for cleaning, but they're sealed during fermentation. —Paul Franson Continuum Estate St. Helena, Calif. Annual case production: 2,700 Average bottle price: $175 W ith the means and ability to build a wine-production facility anywhere along the West Coast, the Murphy family opted to buy land for their Presqu'ile Winery in the Santa Maria AVA of California's Central Coast. The winery's focus is Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and winemaker Dieter Cronje uses a gravity-based system as part of his low-inter- vention approach to winemaking. Grapes arrive at the winery in half-ton MacroBins and can be stored in a cool room right next to the crush pad, giving the winemak- ing team more flexibility with pick dates and processing grapes. The crush pad and cold room are located at the top of the winery, and the fermentation cellar and barrel cave are located below it. Cronje is a proponent of whole-cluster fermentations but said one of the challenges of the approach is the thick mass of ma- terial in the tank. To break that mate- rial up, workers use a heavy-duty pneumatic punch-down device designed by R.S. Randall & Co. and connected to a rail system above the tanks. The grapes that do get destemmed are run through an Armbruster Rotovib destemmer and then fur- ther sorted with a Vaucher Beguet Mistral 60, both from Scott Laboratories. For red fermentations, Presqu'ile is set up with 20 red fermentation tanks, which are a mix of stainless steel open tops from Criveller and concrete open tops made by Sonoma Cast Stone. The winery has 22 tanks for white wines including more stainless steel tanks by Criveller and four concrete eggs from Sonoma Cast Stone and one by Nomblot. Tank tempera- tures are controlled by a central TankNet system. —Andrew Adams Both the concrete and oak fermentation vats at the winery feature a trun- cated shape and temperature control coils that can be remotely operated. Processed grapes fall from the crush pad level directly into open- top concrete and steel tanks. Presqu'ile Winery Santa Maria, Calif. Annual case production: 8,000 Average bottle price: $40 The Armbruster Rotovib is distributed by Scott Laboratories.