Step Two

The level of participation is completely up to you!

Making your wine, your way. Red or white? What kind of barrel? What style of finish?

Red Wine

All red 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. Then, the fruit is sent through 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 feel free to bring friends to help!

This is where 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 will 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. Once all this is done, 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 (again, you’re welcome to come help with this!). We’ll be monitoring your wine; topping barrels, doing lab analysis 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 appproved and then printed.

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

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, then the juice from the press is then transferred to steel tanks for initial fermentation.

For white wines, we recommend a controlled secondary malolactic fermentation for stability at 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 time, red and white wines are processed the same.