Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/90739
WINEMAKING TECHNICAL REVIEW Winemaker Luisa Ponzi fills barrels. Destemmed fruit falls one level into fermentation bins. Chardonnay barrels, not fire-bent, and she procures them from small, artisan coopers such as Saury, Allary and Damy. But fond as she is of good coopers, Ponzi gets most exu- berant when pointing toward a rack of old, used, stainless steel Coca-Cola drums that she thinks came into the winery when Am- ity Vineyards winemaker Myron Redford discovered a Coke plant that was going out of business and alerted the winemaking community. "I use these for everything," she says with satisfaction. Enologist Joshua Wilkinson works in the lab. 46 WINES & VINES NOVEMBER 2012 For cleaning all those barrels, Ponzi is not a fan of ozone. She worries that its microbe-snuffing capabilities might be too effective and could threaten the winery's well-behaved population of good, wild microbes. Instead, her crew spends a lot of time with Gamajet pressure washers. Just as very little is added to the grapes at fermentation time, not much is taken out before bottling through fining or filtration. Whites get bentonite fining for heat stability, like nearly all commercial whites; the aromatic whites get sterile fil- tration, increasingly via crossflow through Cascade Wine Services, a mobile provider. Reds and the Chardonnay rarely get fined or filtered, and if a particular batch needs help, the usual remedies are milk or egg whites. Whites are cold stabilized by tank chilling down to 35ºF. Wines flow down to the fourth, bottom level for bottling on a GAI monoblock line. About 90% of the Tricor Braun bottles get Stelvin screwcap closures; some higher priced reserve lots are sealed with natural cork from Rich Xiberta. Labels are de- signed in-house and printed by Label One. And since the fourth level is the coolest, it also hosts case goods storage until the wine heads for the marketplace POLARA STUDIO POLARA STUDIO