Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/840286
WINEMAKER INTERVIEW July 2017 WINES&VINES 39 Pioneers in Polyethylene for Wine 25 Years of Experience Thousands of Tanks in Use 208-549-1861 • www.pascopoly.com Tanks 225 to 4500 Gallons QUALITY WINE ALWAYS TOP PRIORITY KiLR-CHiLR ™ Temp Control managed white wine fermentation, storage, and stabilization patented St. Regulus Automatic Fermentor patented managed red wine fermentation, self-pressing lion gallons of wine for 60 or so clients. Our client list is private, but we have wines from $100 a bottle to $15 a bottle, with the majority of our clients in the $20-$40 range. We have clients that have large facilities but need more capacity, or Napa wineries that are subject to the 1990 Winery Definition Ordinance that cannot increase production on their bond, so we do it for them. We have a wonderful staff, led by Joel Green, our general manager and winemaker, cellar master Jose Flores and Leticia Chacon- Rodriguez, our director of operations. When you think of a storage facility, you tend to think of a static environment. Safe Harbor is anything but static, as we perform all sorts of blending operations, white wine fermentation, finishing and filtrations, even bottling. We also do a lot of work with staves and micro-oxygenation, as two of our partners, Alan and Steve Sullivan, are the founders of Stavin Inc., the commercial wine tank stave company. They established the use of staves as an economical and environmentally positive alternative to either barrel use or no barrels at all. I think it is safe to say that they changed our industry and the flavor profile of commer- cial winemaking in general. And not just our industry in the U.S., but also in South America, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and, recently, the European Union. Safe Harbor was designed using 20 years of stave and micro- oxygenation information and experience. Q In your work as a consulting wine- maker, you see a lot of new winery technology. Is there anything you're par- ticularly excited about? McLeod: I am very impressed with the im- provements to the mechanization of the wine industry, most notably some of the optical sorters from Pellenc and Bucher-Vaslin and the mechanical harvesting platforms led by Pellenc Selectiv' harvesters. I was exposed to them while working in the luxury division at Beringer Vineyards, and the results were im- pressive, to say the least. We all know that labor is our No. 1 issue, and we need to adapt. But these systems are additional to quality in most cases. When you see an optical sorter or the Pellenc harvester in operation, you have to acknowledge the achievement, as they are that impressive. Also, packaging continues to change, and agglomerated corks are here to stay. In fact, at the I+Q Conference in St. Helena, Calif., in March, there were advocates of the Diam closure for not just its very low amounts of TCA, but also for the uniformity of oxygen ingress. The oxygen transmission rate has a huge effect on SO 2 decline and bottle variation in a finished, packaged wine. So high-end producers who would not have used an agglo closure 10 years ago are now considering them as an option. For the producers who will always use natu- ral cork, the ability for cork suppliers to test their corks individually for taint is a game changer. We are appreciative and happy to see them invest in the equipment, additional floor space and sophisticated detection equipment to give winemakers the highest level of confi- dence possible for use in their wines. A resident of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Laurie Daniel has been a journalist for more than 35 years. She has been writing about wine for publications for more than 21 years and has been a Wines & Vines contributor since 2006. A winemaker is expecting the difference in finished wine to be driven by differences in the grape supply, but that is not always the case.