Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/62507
CO VER S T OR Y Shauna Rosenblum dumps a bin full of Jesse's Vineyard Zinfandel into the crusher, after which juice will be pumped into a stainless steel tank. from Santa Rosa Stainless, with some intriguing, one-of-a-kind vessels also purchased from the ALCO metal scrap yard in San Leandro. Eight new tanks are due from Italy this fall. Rosenblum concentrates on six cooperages for barrels: Seguin Moreau for American oak, and Ermitage, Gamba, François Frères, St. Martin and Meyrieux for French barrels. Rock Wall manages to clean all its barrels (and those of its alternating proprietors) with an old Rosenblum-legacy two-barrel washer refurbished by Process Engineers. Ozone is available through a DEL Ozine AGW-0500 system and is used mainly for tank sanitation. Finishing things off All the Rock Wall wines finish off with sterile crossflow filtra- tion using a Koch 4 cartridge unit owned by Matt Smith, whose Blacksmith Cellars is one of the AP's under the Rock Wall roof. Smith also serves as the AP liaison, helping to coordinate all the activities of 10 different labels during the crush. The Rosenblums decided that buying their own bottling line was not cost efficient, given the size of the new venture, so bot- tling chores are handled through a mobile line from Gallo's G3 Enterprises. All the wines are finished with natural corks from Portocork America; experiments some years back with synthetics were problematic, and Shauna Rosenblum says there's "some- thing archaic and romantic about pulling corks and unfoiling." After launching the brand with a complicated, multi-pass paper label, Rock Wall has moved all its wines to screen-printed labels by Monvera, applied to bottles from Encore!Glass. Managing and marketing Besides not needing temperature control, Rock Wall manages to avoid one other common feature of winery infrastructure: bank financing. The initial launch involved some leases and lines of credit, now paid off, but current winemaking is financed by the income from wine sales. Rock Wall uses no winery management software; when asked how she compiles all those reports to the TTB and other agen- cies, Rosenblum rolled out a well-stuffed file drawer in her desk. Wines & Vines OCTOBeR 2011 33