Pressing the Wine Process of Wine Making
The old fashioned screw presses are disappearing from today's
wineries, replaced by modern airbag presses which are large, horizontal
stainless steel cylinders, with hundreds of elongated apertures through
which the must escapes. Inside the slowly revolving cylinder is a large
rubber bag that is inflated when the press has been filled with must,
squeezing the juice by gentle pressure that does not smash pips or small
pieces of stalks and so let into the wine too much unwanted tannin or
other acids that will flavor it. After the first "free-run" wine has
been pumped to its holding vats or casks. the second and third pressings
are separated, for these contain the greatest concentration of acids and
aldehydes from the skins and pips and stalks, and must judiciously be
added to the free-run wine to balance it. The remaining pressings are
piped away to be distilled into grape spirit.
Many modern devices are available to today's winemaker, and he uses them
to make a better product than his forebears, or at least a product less
prone to failure or fault. But there are still ancient practices which
modern science is unable to duplicate. A newly fermented wine,
particularly a dry red, must go through the process of racking and
ageing, preferably in wood casks, before being bottled, for there is as
yet no other satisfactory physical or chemical process that will achieve
the necessary early maturation. Nothing but a wood cask, usually of
French or American oak, will impart to the wine the "woody" flavor that
is such a desirable part of its character. And there seems to be no way
to shorten the process by which a wine settles out its sediments,
however carefully the winemaker fines and brightens it by filtering.
It is possible to prevent a bottled wine from "throwing a crust", i.e.,
forming a tartaric crystalline deposit, by controlled refrigeration in
its youth, but the process is not favored for the red wines, although
widely used in the making of whites. Indeed it has become the fashion
today to regard a white wine that has crusted as a not well made wine.
The tartaric crust in no way affects the flavor of the wine, nor its
appearance (provided it is carefully poured or decanted), and is often
regarded as an indication that a dry red has been well matured in its
bottle.
In fermenting a red wine, the winemaker is careful to leave the skins in
the fermenting vat with the juice, for it is from the skins that the
wine takes its color, and some of the tannin which helps to preserve it.
He is equally careful quickly to remove the skins from his fermenting
white wines, for if left too long in the juice, the wine will become
deep yellow instead of the desirable pale yellow-green. In between the
two are the rose wines which have become very popular in recent years.
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