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100 WINES&VINES November 2015 WINEMAKING TECHNICAL SPOTLIGHT Laid out in the above graphic and accom- panying text are the key steps and equipment in wine production at Law Estate Wines. 1 CRUSH PAD Hawley is a consulting winemaker for several Central Coast wineries and owns Torrin Vine- yard with his wife, Viquel Hawley. The Laws hired Hawley to help design both the vine- yard and the winery, and from the start he advocated a simple approach to winemaking that he says respects the care taken in the vineyard. He says Law doesn't apply pesti- cides or other inputs in the vineyard, so the grapes don't require much manipulation in the cellar, a modern interpretation of centu- ries-old winemaking practices. "It's very clean, it's very simple," he said. "You look at this estate, and it's in a beautiful place, and it's in a beautiful location, but when we really break it down to the nuts and bolts of it: It is basic and simple and as clean and straightforward as possible." Whole clusters are dumped onto Key Iso- Flo shaking tables with stainless steel hop- pers where they undergo sorting before falling into a Bucher Vaslin E-2 destemmer. The destemmed grapes then receive another round of hand sorting on an Iso-Flo shaker table that sorts out raisins, stems and shot berries. "There's not a lot of moving parts," Hawley said. There's not a lot of bells and whistles, and again that carries over as a di- rect reflection of how we farm." 2 TRANSFER TO FERMENTATION TANKS The most unique step of the production pro- cess at Law Estate is how the grapes get from the crush pad to tanks. Grapes fall from the shaker table into cus- tom-built stainless steel dumpers that cellar workers move on to a stainless steel catwalk built by SCI that provides access to all the top hatches of the tanks. Once positioned in place above a tank, workers connect the dumper to a compressed air hook up, hit a switch and the grapes slide out of the dumper directly into the tank. Custom metal fabricator Steve Rinell, who is based in San Luis Obispo, Calif., built the dumpers as well as steel screens that go over the tank tops to help ensure worker safety. Hawley said the process is gentle on the grapes, efficient, quick and clean. "We have two of them (the dumpers) that could be in a loop, but we found that it's so quick by the time we get down there and dump it, it's less than a minute," he said. The system also limits the mess of harvest to just a small area beneath the sorting equipment, and that makes clean up at the end of a long harvest day quicker and eas- ier—and it doesn't require as much water. "Our mess at the end of the day is limited to a 20-square-foot spot on the crush pad," he HOSPITALITY A. Arrival from parking lot B. Initial view of barrel storage C. Visitors climb stairs to tasting room D. View of surrounding estate vineyards E. View of grape receiving/fermentation areas F. Outdoor hospitality " When we really break it down to the nuts and bolts of it: It is basic and simple and as clean and straightforward as possible." —Scott Hawley, winemaker