During my visits to wineries, I regularly hear or read about "gravity fed" being used during the winemaking process. What's it all about?
Gravity fed, gravity flow or whatever else you want to call it, the concept is to use gravity in several parts of the winemaking process, especially the crush. The weight of the picked grapes becomes part of the crushing process; some wineries will boast that's their entire process.
Many newer wineries large and small are designed to operate as much as possible using gravity to help crush the grapes on one level, route the juice to another level for the start of fermentation and, for barrel aging, to another lower level.
Some wineries even set up their barrels and racks using a bung hole at each barrel's top and bottom so that as the bottom barrel is filled, its top bunghole is closed, then the bottom bunghole is plugged on the barrel above it and the second-level barrel filled. For a rack stacked several high with barrels, that can save a lot of pumping and minimize the handling of the wine and the barrels.
And, the barrels can be drained from top to bottom once it's time to move the finished wine to the bottling line.
That all saves time, requires fewer workers and "respects the grapes and the wines," as an ardent gravity flow winemaker will tell you.
It's not a new idea, despite the breathless descriptions you might hear from some of the converts to gravity-fed winemaking.
Spend a little time looking on the Web and you'll discover such wineries that are more than 100 years old were built in the Napa Valley, in the Barossa Valley of Australia and in France and Spain and wherever else wine is made. In fact, much of the process probably dates back centuries beyond that.
But it's definitely in vogue now. When I was wine touring on Vancouver Island last summer with my wife, Andy Johnston, owner and winemaker at Averill Creek Vineyard, proudly showed us his gravity flow operation.
The summer before, David and Cynthia Enns of Laughing Stock Vineyards on the Naramata Bench in B.C.'s Okanagan Valley made certain to note how they had put the concept to work.
Go to Oregon, meet a winemaker who produces Pinot Noir, and chances are very good he or she will speak the magic phrase for handling that delicate grape - gravity feed. But the process is used with other varieties as well, especially Sangiovese.
And even wineries making hearty reds from Cabernet Sauvignon and Tempranillo will tell visitors they rely on gravity feed for their winemaking process.
Typically, gravity can be used to squeeze about 80 percent of the juice out of the grapes. That juice is then set to fermenting separately at most red wine operations, and then the wine press takes over to extract another 20 percent, which also goes off to separate fermentation.
For a rosé wine, the separated juices likely will never come back together. In fact, most rosé is hardly squeezed at all and is made from free-run juice, which minimizes the extraction of the color of a red grape, producing that delightful range of pink colors that make for eye appeal and a fruitier, less-robust flavor.
For most red wines, the free-run juice and the pressed juice will be reunited when the winemaker begins to review the wine aging in the barrels and calculate just how much backbone and structure a particular wine will need.
Much of the tannin and many other elements that carry some of our favorite flavors and aromas in a good red wine - tobacco, tar, chocolate, spice, pepper, herbs for example - and that give it a good red's characteristic mouth feel - think tannic, chewy, flannel - get a boost from that last 20 percent that the wine press squeezes out.
Which brings us to a couple more of those delightful French phrases that almost every oenophile will run into eventually.
Vin de goutte is the French term for wine obtained in the free-run process. And vin de presse is what's obtained from crushing the marc, the solids left behind after the first juice is racked off.
As a wine ages in the bottle, many of those elements from the solids will settle out into the sediment, but they will leave behind elements vital to the wine.
Wines words
Since we've been having a little fun with French, how about a couple more terms from the land that loves to look down its nose at New World wines? I recently came across enherbement, which has a polysyllabic playfulness I couldn't ignore. It's the term for allowing grass to grow between the rows of vines, thus retarding soil erosion and keeping a really hot vineyard site a bit cooler.
And to add a timely term now that all the new reds and whites are being released, how about décuvage, the word for the process of taking wine out of the vats?
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