The role of winemaker is romanticized. It conjures up images of daily wine tastings, schmoozing with VIPs, and tranquil vineyards.
But the truth is that winemakers deal with a lot of variables and uncertainty to produce the wine in your glass.
So, let’s talk about what winemakers don’t tell you about making wine!
The Type of Winery Defines Your Role
First of all, winemaking is not a one-size-fits-all profession. The type of winery has a lot to do with the job.
- Estate Winery: Wines made only with grapes from vineyards owned by the winery. Production of wine takes place entirely on the winery’s property.
- Winery Cooperative: Local growers sell their grapes to a regional winery. The winery then produces, markets, and sells the wine. These are common in regions with smaller vineyard sizes and lower wine prices.
- Custom Crush: A winery that offers contract winemaking services to clients. Services may include processing fruit, cellaring, blending, bottling, and laboratory analysis.
So now that we know about where a winemaker might work, let’s start from the beginning: at harvest.
Winemaking During Harvest
Harvest is the busiest season in the winery for everyone, not just the winemaker. Literal tons of grapes arrive for processing daily. Then the winemaking begins.
Let’s peek behind the curtain of a winery’s most exciting time of year.
There is No Secret Formula for Harvest
Deciding when to pick the grapes is one of the winemaker’s most important decisions. Pick too early, and the acidity might be too high, the sugars too low, and the tannins too green.
Pick too late and you’ll have the opposite problems. All winemakers have a different approach to making the decision on when to pick. Some rely on science, others rely on their senses, and some rely on a combination of both.
Pre-harvest, I am running pH, TA, and brix on vineyard samples to track ripeness. Mostly, these numbers are great for historical tracking and data. If you are just going off numbers in a lab and not out in the vineyard tasting the grapes and assessing the state of the vines, then you aren’t getting the full picture.
How an Estate Winery Decides When to Harvest
At an estate winery, winemakers have the luxury to walk the vineyards every day leading up to harvest. They look at, touch, and taste the grapes while considering the following:
- How tough or thick are the skins?
- Are the seeds green (indicating unripe fruit) or brown?
- Do the grapes taste tart or sweet?
- Do the grapes taste good?
Doing this every day provides a frame of reference to make a more informed decision. Analysis on the brix, pH, and total acidity of the grapes provides data for this decision.
How a Cooperative Winery Decides When to Harvest
At a cooperative winery, growers harvest their grapes once they meet the rules set by the winery. Growers typically follow phytosanitary requirements (measurements including sweetness level and acidity level) from the cooperative.
How well the growers meet the parameters determines how much they get paid for their crops.
Custom Crush Wineries Don’t Decide When To Harvest
By nature of the business, a winemaker’s duties at a custom crush winery begin when the grapes arrive. Additionally, custom crush winemakers often source fruit from multiple regions.
McLaren Vintners definitely allows for good exposure to the regions, varieties, and styles that are unparalleled [in Australia]. Every year, there are new things to learn.
But when the grapes arrive, the work’s just begun.
Winemakers are Experts in Logistics
So, the grapes arrive at the winery. Now, what does a winemaker do? Depending on the grapes, their quality, and the wine style, they have some decisions to make.
- Figure out how to prep the grapes for winemaking.
- Find the right fermentation vessel.
- Choose the aging vessel.
Organization before harvest is important for smooth processing when harvest is in full swing. Winemakers determine ahead of time whether to use concrete tanks, terracotta amphorae, or neutral barrels.
During harvest, decision-making is constant, and improvising is paramount, especially during a heat wave when things are moving quickly inside and outside of the cellar. We are constantly planning and replanning the week ahead to try to prevent logjams. It starts with coordinating picks, deliveries, processing times, available tanks and fermenters, press times, and getting wine into barrel.
A boutique estate winery may process 250 tons in an entire vintage. However, a large custom crush winery can process that amount of fruit in one day. This requires a high level of logistical organization.
Juggling such an array of customers throughout the year can be a logistical challenge, magnified during harvest. The site crushed over 6,500 tons. To process more, we had to do things like packing together ferments that we don’t normally pack together. Or liberating back-vintage oak batches to big tanks so that we could press other batches and put them into barrels.
However, no matter how airtight a plan is, you must be prepared to make the same decision multiple times.
Winemakers are Master Decision Makers
Beyond producing wine, winemakers face countless decisions. There’s a need to respond to changing variables from vineyard to bottle. Tasting and smelling the wine throughout fermentation and aging is crucial. This allows winemakers to track the progress of the wine.
I pay attention to the way a must is tasting in the fermenter: How does it smell? Does it need air? What’s the temperature? How does the wine taste? Should it get another punch down or a pumpover? Should you press sooner rather than later? I look at brix and temperature for every fermenter, every day.
Of course, there are many other considerations that winemakers often take into account, from the types of yeast to the desired wine styles to how best to work with clients.
My wines are the offspring of the vineyards. From a young vineyard (15 years old), my easy-to-drink “base” Cannonau is born. This wine can be consumed young, but ages very well thanks to its high acidity. The old vine vineyard (100+ years old) is used to produce my reserve. This is a wine that shows best after 3 or 4 years of aging and has more complexity than the other.
Working with certain types of yeasts is more difficult because they are more unpredictable, but they certainly give us results that lead to a greater characterization of our product.
At times, we are simply messengers that ensure processing instruction is carried out to our customers’ expectations.
Winemaking Beyond Harvest
Most physical winemaking occurs during the 2-to 3-month harvest period. But winemakers are busy throughout the year. What do they do outside of harvest? Here are some examples:
- Ensure wines complete malolactic fermentation.
- Determine final blends with wine blending trials.
- Bottle wines.
- Vineyard management (pruning, vine training, canopy management, etc.)
- Operations work and travel to sell your wines.
Being a winemaker is a gratifying and exciting job. However, the work it requires demands resilience, strategy, and planning. It’s not a job for people who don’t like to work!
One thing is for sure: working hard does make you thirsty!