By Maggie Smith
Our monthly make your own barrel meeting was last week. I hate calling them meetings since at your typical work meetings you don’t drink wine, dine at Province, and chat with amazing food and wine loving people. However there was some “work” to be done. We combined our Cabernet tasting with our Pinot [...]

by Maggie Smith
Tasting wine for a living is a tough job, but someone has to relay this information to you! Last week at Gibson’s Steakhouse, our barrel group’s “mission” (linked blog post from last thursday) was to bring a bottle of wine in the $50-to-$100 price range from anywhere in the world to blind taste, [...]

This is the pomace from red wine fermentation that is made up of the skins, seeds, stems of red wine.  once the juice has been pressed away from these solids, the pomace is sold off to goats farm as feed.

This is some grapes that have gone through their primary fermentation and are being dropped in the bladder press to remove some additional juice.  This “pressed” juice will be handled separately and will generally provide structure and backbone to the final blend.

Bengi shows us how to do a hand punchdown on some fermenting Zinfandel.  The process of hand punchdowns allow for the gentle extraction of color, flavor, tannin and intensity.  The caps you must punch through are very thick and require some serious elbow grease.

Darren shows us how to hand punch down some Zinfandel.

Maggie demonstrates how to hand punch down to extract color, flavor, tannin and intensity.

The Just Grapes Barrel Project crew learn about red wine fermentation and their thick caps made up of skins, seeds, stems and other solids.  The caps is where red wine gets it’s color, flavor and extraction.

Stuart Ake of Crushpad discussing with the Just Grapes Barrel Project 2008 Crew the the importance of ripeness of seeds and stems in addition to the grapes. Seeds and stems provide tannin.  Stuart demonstrates the difference in look and size of grapes like Pinot Noir, Merlot and more.

Stuart Ake of Crushpad discussing how the difference of grape sizes, colors, density of cluster sizes and more affect the wine in your glass.  This meeting was part of the Barrel Project 2008 when the group was out at Crushpad making their own wine.