Day 17: 13/10/2011 – Another Cold Spell

There wasn’t much going on today due to the sudden return of the rainy weather. It was freezing cold. Temperature has dropped to seven degrees. In fact, weather was so bad, none of the pickers worked today so they were put on bottling duties.

Over at our end, we decided to take some time to check on the bottles of wine that we have re-corked. To our dismay, the sulphur levels were not at the level we wanted and so we had go through the trouble of taking all the corks out and re-doing everything again. This time, we did a more thorough cleaning of the bottled.

Salomon Winery - recorking

A few pressings were done but other than that, things were significantly quiet. The grapes brought in tasted more diluted but flavours were still acceptable.

In my earlier post, I talked about pressing juice and how it is usually separated from the free-run. The reason for that is that pressing juice is considered of lesser quality as compared to the free-run due to more exposure to oxidation and the flavours not being as pure as the free-run.

Apparently, the practice here at Salomon is to add a portion of the pressing with the free-run to be fermented together so as to impart more texture to the wine. Unlike other wineries that would ferment both separately and blend them later before the bottling process, Salomon has no qualms when it comes to mixing them up together as the belief is that both free-run and pressing are good enough to be put together at the initial stage.

We are looking at about 1/8 of the wine having pressings juice. Perhaps this explains the lack of overt fruity flavours of the wines compared to a new world wine that would shun pressing juice and use them only in the entry level stuff. Thus, this is one of the differences between new world and old world wine-making.

To me, this is a big shift in wine-making for someone who is more familiar with new-world wine-making and that makes me question the teaching that pressing juice is always inferior to free-run. To the old-world guys, it is less of a question of which is better but how both elements can be used to make a better wine.

At the end of the day, the blokes and I had some time off for the night so we went out for a few drinks just to unwind.

The Rain Clears