Editor's Letter
Read Up on Technology and Barrels Before Crush
THIS ISSUE HAS A LOT OF GOOD READING for you winemakers who are enjoying a month of relative calm before harvest and visualizing your upcoming fermentations. July is Wines & Vines’ Technology Issue, so we emphasize several types of digital and mechanical technology that can improve wine quality and winemaking efficiency during the coming vintage.
Senior editor Andrew Adams visited the new Riboli Family Winery in Paso Robles, Calif., to report on aspects of the design and construction of the crush pad and cellar, as well as the equipment in which the fast-growing, Los Angeles-based outfit invested.
Next in the technological vein is regular contributor Laurie Daniel’s Q&A with Scott McLeod, formerly winemaker at Coppola’s Rubicon/Inglenook in Napa Valley. McLeod has become a service provider for wineries, using the Adams-Harbertson tannin assay as the basis for a business that helps winemakers better understand phenolics in their grapes and wines.
Two Product Focus articles are in this issue. The first, discusses the leading software products for winemaking, while the other is part two of Richard Carey’s report on membrane filtration equipment and suppliers.
We know that more and more of you are letting indigenous yeast handle your fermentations. It’s a lot cheaper than buying yeast, for one thing, and the other potential benefits are valuable for wine quality and complexity. However, uninoculated should not mean unmanaged. Yeast researcher Debra Rossouw from South Africa contributes a good, practical overview of how to shepherd the wild yeast along as they do their thing.
In the Wine East section, Denise Gardner from Penn State tackles a problem with which West Coast winemakers are certainly familiar but may not suspect is an issue east of the Rockies. Eastern vineyards are known for producing high-acid fruit, and that usually means low pH. But in recent vintages high acid and high pH have occurred together, related to soil potassium. Gardner studied how—and especially when—to best lower the pH via acid additions.
Oak is another big topic this month. You’ll find two reports on barrels that stem from sessions at the recent Wines & Vines Oak Conference. Winemakers did most of the talking at the event, and in one session a panel of four from Covenant Wines, Jeff Cohn Cellars, Robert Mondavi Winery and Obsidian Ridge Vineyards mostly agreed that subtlety is important when using barrels.
A related piece covers a tasting and discussion by winemakers from Fetzer Vineyards, Calluna Vineyards and Schweiger Vineyards & Winery about the benefits of red barrel fermentation. The article shares their practices, successes and frustrations with the time-consuming technique.
That’s it for July, but I want to remind readers that August will bring not just the beginning of harvest for some folks, but also the return of the Wines & Vines Packaging Conference on Aug. 16. It’s year number four for this popular and growing one-day meeting and trade show in Napa Valley. You are invited to register at wvoak.com, then come and learn how to improve your package design and functionality. We hope to see you there!