Days of Red, Nights of Red

Chris Scott in his
Oak Knoll Vineyard

Oak Knoll Merlot destined for
Red Bridge

It's that time of the crush season when we only see red. With the whites safely in tanks and happily fermenting or finished fermenting, all of our attention is focussed on our red varietals. Over the past 10 days, we have put through 16 tons of merlot, cabernet franc, and a bit of cabernet sauvignon. Most of that coming in last weekend when we received the first 2 blocks of the Oak Knoll Merlot. 20 bins of it with another 18 arriving today. Tasty grapes from an amazing vineyard that still has green leaves soaking up the last bits of autumn sun.

yes, thats a Rider T-shirt!

Along with the crush comes the inevitable punchdowns where we manually "punch" the floating skins back down into the juice in order to extract all of their goodness. This is very labour-intensive as we don't employ any mechanical means but use the old-fashioned method of muscle and a hand tool. I'm a big believer in this method as it helps us stay in touch with the ferments. Look, feel, listen, smell. It all counts towards making our wines what they become. The reds are all fermented in half ton or one ton bins which makes for a lot of ferments but also enables us to use a multitude of yeasts each chosen to bring certain elements to the wine. Every year we tweak it a bit and add a new yeast just for experimentation purposes.

punching down

We are looking forward to getting the rest of the cabernet into our cellar and finishing the reds off and into barrel. But in the meantime, there are more punchdowns to do so I have to get back to work....