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
This is the second year that Just Grapes has operated the “Make your own Barrel” program. What we do, as a group, is tour the entire wine making process, from grape to bottle. Whether you are the total wine geek that wants his or her wine customized to suit their palate, or the [...]

A whole lot of discussion goes on at wine tastings about oak: how long one particular wine was aged in oak; did the ageing occur in new American oak barrels; or were they French barriques (standard casks which holds 225 litres, or 300 bottles)? But, what does it all mean?

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.