In our family vineyard my in-laws and I harvest, crush and de-stem by hand this years yield of wine grapes. In what use to be an old horse corral we have mostly red varieties of grapes, Zinfandel and Primitivo along with some Petite Syrah. For some reason there’s also a few rows of Chardonnay. Some years we’ve had pretty big yields of grapes and have hired agricultural workers to help pick the fruit with us, but this year, the yield was a bit lighter than usual and so we opted to pick all of it by hand ourselves. After harvest and crush, we collect the de stemmed and crushed fruit and store it in giant food grade barrels for the initial ferment and punch down, punch down typically happening several times a day for the first 10 or so days. After punch down the wine gets racked into glass carboys, or the few small actual oak barrel we have till it’s fermented long enough to bottle.
