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WINEMAKING carbon dioxide out. If your stainless-steel white seems unusually lifeless, sparge with CO2 and revive it. Sure enough, method No. 4, the hu- man mouth test, dominates the small- and medium-sized wine industry. Lisa Van de Water says that testing (she relies on a Car- bodoseur) is a fine thing to do and can help with consistency from year to year, but taste is the real test. "If you sell all your wine, if people seem to like it, if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Cellar sampling Enough of me; let's hear from a random sample of small winemakers in the carbon dioxide trenches. Steve Pessagno, owner/winemaker at 9,000-case Pessagno Winery in Monterey County, Calif., has an engineer's head on his shoulders. Turns out that when he was the production winemaker at Lockwood Vineyard, making hundreds of thousands of cases of wine per year, monitoring CO2 levels via Carbodoseur was part of the standard routine. Now that he makes only a few thousand cases of ultra-premium Pi- not Noir, Syrah and Chardonnay, he fol- lows his palate, including tasting wine at both room temperature and cellar temper- ature, which can be two entirely different experiences. He doesn't measure dissolved oxygen, either. "We get the same results year after year by doing things the same way, over and over," he says. Eleni Papadakis at Oregon's 15,000-case Domaine Serene says they do consider CO2 but it isn't a focus. "We try to preserve what's in the grapes, but not with intervention. Ex- cessive use of nitrogen to reduce oxygen can strip out CO2 , too. And we try to minimize motion." With no particular target level es- tablished, "we don't measure, because we wouldn't take any action." The winery does have a Carbodoseur, occasionally employed for "edification." Not far away in Oregon, the Beaux Freres winery has an equally hands-off policy when it comes to CO2 . And accord- , ing to marketing director Kurt Johnson, the combination of a cold cellar and virtu- ally no racking means that their Pinot Noir naturally arrives at bottling time with a slight petillance; on occasion, in fact, writ- ers have speculated that the Beaus Freres wines were undergoing malolactic in the bottle, which they weren't. "If you're Commercial Netting Fabrics When Protection Matters • Vinenet • MultiVine • Vineside • Vineside EZ 10 • Shade Net TonnellerieDeJarnac_Dir10 11/11/09 3:40 PM Page 1 1-800-560-4667 • www.galepacific.com Contact us for more information and samples: WECO M.O.G. Sorter Optical Sorting of Stems, Jacks, Shot Berry and Foreign Material Based in California Rental and Purchase Options Sorting and Automation Solutions 1-800-984-0844 / wecotek.com Handcrafted & Authentic Contact: Yannick Rousseau Tel: (707) 332 4524 • Fax: (707) 224 8734 Email: yannickrousseau@sbcglobal.net Website: www.tonnellerie-de-jarnac-16.com Wines & Vines MAY 2011 69