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TECHNICAL SPOTLIGHT WINEMAKING September 2016 WINES&VINES 47 Advantages of an estate winery Winemaker Stephen Cruzan joined the winery in August 2014, just after major construction was complete. Cruzan met Phil Titus while he was working at Chappellet and took the job at Titus Vineyards after working for three years as the assistant winemaker at CADE on Howell Mountain. After working at the new winery for nearly a year, Cruzan said he's come to appreciate how well the building design incorporates the vineyard and cellar. "I think it's really cool that the roll-up doors for the barrel room and for the tank room are glass, so even when they're down you see right through, and those views are never interrupted," he said. "I think it gives people who visit a really neat feeling that they're very connected to the winemaking pro- cess and the vineyard, and it makes the place feel very open." The new winery offers the winemaking team the advantage of the grapes being just a short tractor ride from the covered crush pad. Eric Titus said the 2015 harvest typically began at around 6 a.m., and the grapes would start arriving at 8 a.m. Cruzan said it's easy for him to know exactly how many tanks he needs to fill in a certain day, and there's no need to make pick decisions based on whether there's an open tank at the custom-crush winery. The grapes are delivered in half-ton Mac- roBins and dumped with a forklift into a Carlsen & Associates elevated conveyor. The conveyor empties in to a Delta Oscillys destem- mer from Bucher Vaslin that sends destemmed berries onto a Bucher sorting table for a round of manual sorting. An Evoveneta must pump from Criveller then pushes the sorted berries via a hose over the top hatch of closed-top stainless-steel tanks. A portion of the berries get broken by the must pump and transfer providing a mix of whole and crushed fruit. "We want a nice va- riety of whole berries and crushed berries," Cruzan said. "I think if we crushed every grape we'd wind up with too tannic wines." Cruzan said he was impressed with the Delta Oscillys, which is a relatively new destemmer that uses the cylindrical force of swinging de- stemming cages to gently spring the berries free of their stems. The machine tended to leave the hard raisins on the stems while treating the whole berries rather gently. "Any stems that came through were really pretty big actually; they were really easy for the sorters to pick out, so the fruit going into the must pump was really clean," Cruzan said, adding there weren't too many of the small, green jacks either. After a cold soak of three to five days, the must is inoculated with yeast to initiate fermen- tation, which is typically rather short and warm and conducted with BBX or RP 15. The goal is for quick, efficient extraction of flavor and color and then to get the wine down in barrels. Each fermentation receives about two pumpovers per day with goose-neck irrigators from Carlsen & Associates. "We would prefer to be aggressive up front and get our tannin out and be able to really control the amount of tannin we get and then just get it off the skins and let things go dry in the barrel," Cruzan said. Eric Titus said he and his brother have done several trials with extended maceration but have found that pressing sweet results in a more balanced wine profile. "The color is all there, the extraction is there that you need, and anything after that is just going to be af- fecting the aromatics and flavor profile," he said. "With so much extraction you have to lay it down for a long time, and when it's ready to drink the fruit will have started to fade." The winery is equipped for at least two tank turns per harvest and has five 10-ton fermentors, two 4-ton tanks and five 7-ton tanks. All of the tanks were built by Santa Rosa Stainless Steel, which also did the catwalks and metal railings on the crush pad. Tank temperature is controlled and monitored with a TankNet system. A Technova 50 press from Diemme Enologia is used for both reds and whole-cluster pressing of whites. The reds are usually pressed between 1° and 5° Brix and then transferred to a mix of new and neutral Hungarian, French and Ameri- can oak barrels. The Napa Valley Cabernet ages in about 50% new oak, and of that 50% is Hungarian, 30% French and the rest is American. The re- Your lender of choice for agricultural capital • Agricultural real estate lender for 98 years • Long-term fxed or adjustable rate mortgage fnancing • Real estate secured revolving line of credit • Competitive interest rates • Flexible terms and structuring www.metlife.com/ag Rates are attractive —contact us today. 559.435.0206 Agricultural Investments © 2015 METLIFE, INC. © '15 PNTS This press is used for red pomace and to press whole clusters of white varieties.