The Inoculation Debate and Pressing the Days Away

It's been a month since my last post and I feel overwhelmed by writing everything that has happened in that time. Let's just say that hundreds of pumpovers have been completed, 30 or so delestages, lots of yeast have been pitched (a beer reference to keep it real), a few tons of pomace has been pressed and continues to be pressed, endless amounts of mate has been consumed, and an almost equal amount of tortitas and sopaipilla have been scarfed down by somebody with cracking wine stained hands. There have been 2 asados and many more liters of beer as well as a handsome amount of Malbec and other varietals. Ping pong champions have been crowned and dethroned, homemade pizza marathons, a few soccer games, one winery visit, a birthday party and a trip to the uco valley round out the month. Now that that's taken care, I'll get back to the blog.

Ready to inoculate a tank

There is a lot of debate about the use of cultured vs. indigenous yeasts. The ideology here is that each tank completes fermentation without complication. This means that we use cultured yeast that can sustain higher alcohols and higher temperatures during fermentation that will get the job done time after time.  With indigenous yeast, depending on what strain you happen to have been given by nature, there are no such guarantees. If, for example, the pickers didn't get to the syrah block when they should have and it comes in at 28 Brix, the wine would reach 16.7% alcohol. If your native yeast stops working at 15%, you're stuck with residual sugar, a stuck fermentation and a huge headache for the winemaker.

Recently inoculated experimental bin of Barbera

Some expensive designer yeasts supposedly help round out the mid-palate or express more fruit in the nose, but the ones used here are your standard workhorse that won't affect the final product in one way or another. There are a lot of winemakers that swear by using indigenous yeast and I've had a lot of wines that I really enjoyed of this nature, but I can understand the concern, especially when producing even a small to medium amount of wine. That said, if I were to make another barrel anytime soon, I'd let it go 'au natural.' What normally happens in small experiments is that a winery is infested with cultured yeast which overtake whatever the natural yeast anyways and there isn't much difference in the wine or its subtle nuances. An interesting debate and one that I expect to continue for years to come.

Our faithful supervisor

Not so controversial is pressing. We have finished fermenting all of our tanks and now are filling the days with lots of pomace cakes and the noise of our 70 year old press chugging away like a freight train from years past.  We have an old school hydraulic basket press that works when it wants and requires a lot of TLC on a day to day basis. It reminds me of a grouchy old person with irritable bowles. The 'repair men' come to 'fix' it every other day and even then we cross our fingers with each load hoping that it isn't its last. At times it builds up so much pressure that it spews out chunks of pomace in any which way.  We may have set the world record for longest distance yesterday of at least 90 feet. I feel fortunate that I've been on the wrong end only once, but that one time was enough for me as I got blasted in my ear from close range and had to check to make sure I still had all my body parts.  If nothing else, I provided everyone with some comic relief and then gave one of the girls here the opportunity to wash me off which she took full advantage of by drenching me from head to toe. I guess I had it coming.


As tends to be the case here at the winery, much is done by hand or without the use of mechanized equipment. Where in Napa there seems to be a higher standard level of equipment and machinery, things down here tend to be quite the opposite. That said, things get done just the same but tend to be more time consuming.  As the tanks are dug out, somebody awaits with a wheelbarrow.  Once full to the brim, it's then run up a ramp and dumped into the basket press awaing below.  Once the basket press is full, it's then directed over to the press and slowly elevated and pressed against a fixed steel plate, until vibrant tones of violet and fucsia are seen squirting out the crevices. and draining into the hose below.  This pressed juice is pumped over to it's other half, the wine that has already been made and the two are reunited until further action is to be taken. 

A halfway dug out tank

                As opposed to using a large bladder press which can damage seeds and produce extremely harsh and tannic press run, the advantage of the basket press is that it is more gentle.  In the end we get relatively less juice, but it is of higher quality. For this reason all the pressed juice is used.  One of the nice things about pressing is that there is a finite amount of work to be done and then all that is left to do is wait. Inbetween press loads, there isn't too much to do other than gossip, drink mate and tidy up a few things here and there. Whereas the weeks that I spent doing pumpovers there was also something that either should or could be done with whatever spare minutes I had.  What's also nice about pressing is the conotation that it carries, the end is near. Just as the wine itself is about to be finished, so to is the harvest.  Every day there are less pumpovers, less tanks to be cleaned and sanitized, and more time to enjoy the fruits of our labors.