2023 grapes are Harvested!

Wine Making

Japanese/日本語

The wine making was done during the age of Mesopotamia a few thousand years back. The French wine could be said to have a short history. Back then there were no such things like synthetic yeast and sulfite and everything was done naturally. The red color of red wine is coming from the skin of "black" grapes and the white wine could be colored by having skin contact with the skin of white grapes. In fact a few hundreds years ago orange wine out of white grapes was popular. You can find many old European paintings showing orange wine. The regular white wine is made by not having skin contact so that juice remains white (transparent) .

The fundamental rules for natural wine are "add nothing" and "subtract nothing". The synthetic yeast and the sulfinate are invented for the mass production of wine. For us there is no concept of mass production and we should go with "natural" wine as it has been done for thousands of years.

Fermenting with natural yeast

When you try to ferment the grape with natural yeast it takes time to start being active. This means that the grape is contacted by oxygen and oxidized, which we like to avoid. In order to avoid the risk of oxidation we crop a small amount of grapes, three or four clusters, a few days earlier than the harvest day and let them start the fermentation. This is called a starter. Once it is fully activated we put the starter on top of a full amount of crushed grapes and have the full amount inoculated with the starter.

Destem

A commercial winery has a machine to separate berries from stems but with our size we cannot afford to install the expensive equipment. We have to do it by hand which takes hours. The good news is that we can choose what to keep and what to discard, which provides better quality wine.

Primary fermentation

Usually sulfate is added and it kills the natural yeast before putting the chemical yeast to start the fermentation but we use the organic natural yeast without putting sulfate. We have to be very patient so that the natural yeast starts to be activated after 24 to 48 hours. We use the starter created earlier to inoculate the grapes with natural yeast. It takes about 10 days to finish the primary fermentation.

Press

We press the grapes and separate the juice from the skin and seeds. After having the juice contact with the skin and the seeds for more than 10 days it creates the structure with tannin and gives the color of wine red.

Sencondary fermentation

The juice already has alcohol in it and we leave it in a carboy (glass container) with an airlock on top of it. It will become completely dry and the malolactic fermentation will start. It is very important to manage the temperature level to have the fermentation active. The airlock will prevent the air from coming in and let CO2 go out.

Racking

After the secondary fermentation you will find the sediment at the bottom of the bottle. You can remove it by syphoning the wine by using a tube and leaving the sediment. The picture shows the racking of one gallon of wine.

Aging

After the fermentation is complete we put the tops and seal the containers and store them in the underground storage. Instead of aging with an oak barrel we put oak chips so that they will give good flavor in the wine.

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