Dirt to Glass: William Church Winery

by Shona Milne on October 23, 2009

punch-down3punch-down2I stopped by William Church Winery on Saturday to do a punch down of the grapes. It’s a process of punching down through the grapes as they sit on top of the juice. It looks easy but it a challenge to punch through the grapes at first. It get a bit easier as they have been punched down and the juice starts to take on more color from the grapes. This is usually done abut three times a day to keep extracting the juice from the grapes. William Church offered this opportunity to wine tasters this past weekend as part of their Harvest Party. They had quite a good turn out and quite a few people took a turn at punching down and sipping on some 2 Spries and Syrah. We are going to be drinking that wine someday.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Marcus 10.24.09 at 8:16 am

I liked you included the picture of the two vials, the one on the right has not been punched down while the the one on the left has been punched down about 20 times.

MR

Charlie 11.19.09 at 12:31 pm

A more efficient method is to swap out wine punch-down with the pneumatage process.

It’s by far the the best way to automate your cap management in single or multiple tanks and also efficiently aerate your juice during fermentation to eliminate the formation of hydrogen sulfide and mercapatans

Pneumatage is business unit of Pulsair Systems and they are located in Bellevue, WA.

http://www.pneumatage.com/
http://www.pneumatage.com/company/customers/

http://vimeo.com/6594151

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>