Make Your Own Wine Video Transcript
Written By: Anonymous on Sat, Oct 13th 2007
Brian Freedman: Welcome to the Classic Wines Minute, brought to you by ClassicWines.com. I am your host, Brian Freedman, and today we're here in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, in the Delaware Valley's premier winemaking center. We are in The Wine Room and we're joined by Kenton Nice. Kenton, thanks so much for joining us today.
Kenton Nice: Thanks for coming.
Brian Freedman: You're going to show us around a little bit, we will taste some of your wines, maybe you will give us a little tour of the facility, teach us how to make wine.
Kenton Nice: I would like to do that.
Brian Freedman: Alright, you know what, there's too much tasting to do here, so let's get started.
Kenton Nice: Terrific.
Brian Freedman: Great. Alright, so, what are we looking at here?
Kenton Nice: We are looking at here 750 pounds of Californian Cabernet. There are 25 boxes of 30 pounds each, and this is what we would use to make the barrel of wine.
What our customers do is that they take these boxes of grapes, and they bring them to our crusher, and they dump them into the crusher. The crusher then takes the grapes to the middle level, where we have a basket with an arm to the center, and as that arm spins with the fingers on it, it's going to knock all the fruit off the wine. The fruit then goes through a set of rubberized crushers. Rubberized, because we don't want to break the seeds, seeds are bitter inside.
Brian Freedman:Right, seeds have tannins as well as the stems.
Kenton Nice: That's right, we want the coatings of the seeds, but we don't want them to be broken. We then pump it through the hose up into the vat. Once it's in the vat, we mix it up, we make the necessary acid adjustments, kill the natural yeast and everything else we need to do, and then create our own fermentation bucket.
Fermentation then takes a week, during which time we go through and we punch down the must, to get these much skin and juice abstractions you would have.
Brian Freedman: Off to the next step.
Kenton Nice: During the week that you're away between crushing and pressing, the grapes need to be punched down twice a day. What happens is, during fermentation the skins rise to the surface, and as you can see, all the skins are on top. What we have beneath those skins is all the juice.
Brian Freedman: Now, why would you want to punch the skins down?
Kenton Nice: We punch down for a couple of reasons. We want to make sure we get that good skin juice ratio, we want to get that good color. We also want to make sure we get out some of that heat. We also want to get a little bit of oxygen in there so the yeast continues to grow. I want to keep the cap in (Inaudible), because I don't want anything to grow on there.
Brian Freedman: Once we have punched down the skins, and it comes time then to get the juice into the press.
Kenton Nice: What we do with this is we scoop the skins, and we dump them around the press. What Michael is doing is put the lid down tight, we're going to put that top on it, because as we stand up, we don't want the bloom to come up, we want the bloom to go out, so we need to continue.
When we're done, we will end up with only about an-inch-and-a-half skins all the way around the outside.
Brian Freedman: So, there's really a lot of liquid in those skins floating on top of their in the cap.
Kenton Nice: Absolutely. If you think about this, we're going to make about 60 gallons of juice at a 750 pounds of grapes, that leaves us about 270 pounds of skins.
Brian Freedman: Okay. How many gallons come out of those?
Kenton Nice: About 60 gallons, we will put 53 gallons in our barrels, the other six or seven gallons will go into the stainless steel tanks that we use for over (Inaudible).
Brian Freedman: Finally, there is a process of racking, can you explain that to us?
Kenton Nice: The fourth step in bottling or in choosing the wine or making the wine, would be racking. Three or so months after the wine has been barreled, the wine will settle, and dead yeast cells or sediment will gather to the bottom of the barrel, and of course that needs to be removed.
So, the actual process of racking is to remove the wine and leave the sediment behind. We then wash the barrel and return the wine to that barrel. Of course then we have three or so gallons of air space, equal to the amount of sediment that we discarded. We then have to top that wine off with the appropriate varietal to maintain the integrity of the barrel.
Brian Freedman: How many times do you rack here?
Kenton Nice: We just rack once, but we do top off throughout the season. We have 50 tons of air-conditioning in the room, and it's always very dehumidified, so we need to keep the air space to the minimum in the barrels.
Brian Freedman: The wine is getting a lot of TLC, even when you can't see it in the barrel.
Kenton Nice: Absolutely. This is what we do and it's what our passion is, and we hope that our customers are pleased with the wine when they leave.
Brian Freedman: It comes through in the bottle, I mean, everything we have tasted has been top notch today.
Kenton Nice: Thank you very much.
Brian Freedman:Thank you. Today at The Wine Room in Cherry Hill, we have covered everything from selecting grapes, to punching down the cap, to racking your wines, to getting them in the barrels, we even tasted a number of wines. I highly recommend coming here. It's a great way to not only make some really great memories of your own, but to learn more about wine than you probably ever thought possible.
As for me, I am not going home with my wines, and I am drinking them for a change, no spit bucket there. From all of us here at ClassicWines, cheers.
