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WINEMAKING TECHNICAL SPOTLIGHT 50 WINES&VINES October 2015 is handling the new tasting room as well. Winemaker Jordan Fiorentini came to Epoch when it opened after working as the director of winemaking at Chalk Hill Estate Vineyards and Winery in Sonoma County, Calif. Fiorentini and as- sociate winemaker Peter Turrone oversee all wine production at Epoch. The winery's main focus is Rhône varietal blends, but it also produces Zinfandel and Tempra- nillo wines from estate grapes. The strategy in the vineyard is Biodynamic, but the estate has not been certified. The vineyard man- ager is Kyle Gingras, a Biodynamic specialist who studied enology at California State University, Fresno, and worked in France before join- ing Epoch. Gingras consults with French Biodynamic expert Philippe Armenier. Justin Smith, winemaker and co-owner at Saxum Vineyards, also consults for Epoch and intro- duced the Armstrongs to the then- f a l l o w p r o p e r t y t h a t w o u l d become Paderewski Vineyard. Total production is around 6,500 cases, but the new winery could expand to 10,000 cases or more. About 80% of the wine is sold di- rect to consumer with the rest to mostly on-premise accounts in several states. Just in time for harvest Construction of the winery fin- ished in the summer of 2014, and Fiorentini said the production team moved into parts of the win- ery as workers finished building the facility. She pressed whites and reds with a Puelo membrane press and fermented those wines in the small warehouse. The crush pad and main fermentation area was finished just in time for the red grapes that started showing up at the end of August. Grapes arrive in half-ton Mac- roBins, and the clusters are dumped onto a Key Technology shaker table for an initial round of cluster sorting before getting processed with a Pellenc Selectiv' machine. The destemmed berries fall onto another Key Technologies table for further hand sorting be- fore they're collected with a stain- less steel receiving bin. The bin is then dumped into a hopper that's placed on the top of fermentation tanks to replicate gravity processing. Red fermenta- tions are managed with punch- downs and pumpovers. "We don't like to pump must," Turrone says. "When we do pumpovers with a pump, we have screens in all of our tanks to filter out the solids so we're not mashing up skins and seeds in our pumps. It's just juice for the pumpover." Fiorentini said she lets the vin- tage dictate whether or not she inoculates or allows the must and juice to ferment spontaneously. "Usually, since our fruit is ripe and Brix relatively high, we let fermen- tation commence naturally and then pitch a yeast to ensure fer- mentation finishes about one- third of the way through the ferment," she said. "But years like 2011, we were 100% native." The 65-acre Paderewski Vineyard is located on the site of a ranch once owned by famous Polish composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski in the early 20th century. After trucks deliver grapes, they pull through the open-air crush pad (above), turn around and go back down the hill. Fruit is processed with a Pellenc Selectiv'. BRITTANY APP