Using timeless classic recipes, chefs impart their own unique style, textures and flavors.  With your wine, we will help you design and implement your unique desires.  While we may have dozens of wines made from the same varietal, each will be distinctive; creating your wine and your story through wine.

Step Two – The Process (level of participation is up to you!)

 

Red Wine
All wine production happens on-site at the winery. Fresh hand-picked fruit is delivered, and goes to the vibrating sorting table for the cluster sort, a de-stemmer, a second vibrating sorting table for the berries then the fruit is sent to a fermentation bin. This process takes about six people, so please bring friends to help!

Now the decisions start!  Working towards your goal, more stylistic decisions include adjusting the pH, acid, and sugar for alcohol production. From there, your wine will go to bin for initial fermentation. And, together, we select and add yeasts, enzymes, tannins and SO2 before and after the fermentation process.

Fermentation takes a few weeks. We punch down’ the cap (floating seeds and skins) several times a day. If you can join us, please come and help. Once the wine is ready, we’ll press the wine, transfer it to a tank to settle and start malolactic fermentation. Then, we move your wine to its barrel.

This begins the peaceful time in winemaking, but over the next several months, we’ll rack and return your wine several times. Please come help us with this. We’ll be monitoring your wine; topping barrels, doing lab analyses and adding components, if needed, to compliment the wine as it ages.

As we start to plan for bottling, you will have designed your labels, with our help, of course. We’ll get them federally and state approved, and printed.

The final steps are fining, filtering and bottling. It is a flurry of activity at the end, but then the wine is yours.

White Wine

White wines are produced just like the reds with only a few changes. Clusters of white wine grapes are de-stemmed and then immediately pressed. The juice from the press will then be transferred to steel tanks for initial fermentation.

For white wines, we recommend secondary malolactic fermentation for stability (no additional cost), but we can stop this process at any point depending on the style of wine you want and transfer it to the barrel. After that, red and white wines are processed the same.