|
Wine of the Week Home
Wine of the Week
Wine News
Whats On
About NZ Wine
Featured Personality
Featured Restaurant
Featured Publication
Wine Reviews
Wine Stories
Food File
Archives
Wine
People
Restaurants
Books
Wine Clubs
Vinous Links
About this Site
|
www.wineoftheweek.com
edited by Sue Courtney
e-mail address: winetaster@clear.net.nz
Virtual Vintage - A Day in the Winery
Part 2
by Sue Courtney
who visited the winery on 26th April 2000
Continued from Page 1 - Crushing the grapes and fermenting the wine at the Matua Valley winery in West Auckland, New Zealand. .
The fermentation is complete and the result is wine - red, red wine. There are fantastic vinous smells around the winery as the tanks are opened. The free-run juice is pumped off first, then the wine soaked-skins are dug out of the tank to be pressed before the wine is pumped into another tank for malolactic fermentation and storage.
Once most of the free-run juice has been pumped off, the door of the tank is opened and the skins are teased into the bin below. The colour of the new wine is vibrant. Tim gets to do the labour intensive digging while spectators look on.
It's part of the job to get into the tank to dig. Tim (left) shows the size of the aperture he had to climb through. It's hot work and the fumes are heady. But fans inside the tank circulate the air and cool the worker. Baden, who normally markets the wine, gets into the action in another tank (middle and right).
Matt picks up the bins and manouevres them around to fill up the press with the wine soaked skins while Anna is on top of the press to ensure the bin is positioned in the correct place. Tim (centre) climbs up to check all is going well while Anna (right) looks after the controls.
Toby ensures the pressed skins coming off the conveyor belt are distributed into the bins below. The berry plum flavours of the pressed skins skins have a licorice, leathery complexity to them - the pips are 4-5 mm long. Then Matt gets into action again, carrying the residues to a waiting truck. More animals will benefit from the wine industry and a tasty feed they will have.
As the juice is pumped off the skins Baden has a turn on the controls while Anna keeps an eye on the flow through the dairy vat. The dark, fatter hose carries the juice from the press into the vat, while the narrower red hose transports the juice out of the vat into the holding tanks. The colour is dense and vibrant and the liquid is thick.
Time for a taste - the workers gather - from left to right Assistant Winemaker Corey Hall, and hard working cellar hands, Toby Barlow and Anna Martins. These three friends studied together at Roseworthy in Adelaide and are graduates of that respected college.
Look at that colour in the glass. And what delicious aromas of plums and chocolate - these are primary merlot fruit characteristics which I will remember for a long time. This is good wine! But there's still work to be done.
Anna cleans the winery, while Toby cleans a tank.
And finally I catch a glimpse of Mark by the tank thats being filled with the pressed wine. Here the wine will undergo malolactic fermentation for next two or so months then it will be racked into barrels for further development. Mark is 1.88 metres tall and the tank holds 11,000 litres of wine. That is equivalent to 2.5 hectares of vines. Mightily deceptive when you see it like this.
It's been a fabulous day for me at the winery but sadly all days come to an end. I leave the team to get on with the work and wend my way home to sit down with a glass of Matua Valley wine and think how lucky we are that these people work so hard for our pleasure.
Thanks to Matua Valley Wines especially Mark Robertson the Chief Winemaker and his hard working staff, for letting me watch and get in their way
If you wish, go back to Part 1 of this story - Crushing the grapes.
Sue Courtney, 18th May 2000
|