Public holidays mean nothing when vintage time comes around.
It’s now Sunday lunchtime and we’re all still here, geared up for more action. Not least Studio Member Adam, who’s waiting for a tonne of Primitivo grapes to arrive for his La Curio label, as we speak.
Meanwhile, our first batch of Shiraz, which got here on Friday, is happily fermenting away, and yesterday the hand plunging got underway.
Notice anything? That’s right, yesterday the back-breaking hand-plunging was left to the girls as winemaker Jess Hardy (left) and vintage worker Jane Parkinson threw themselves into it.
The only male seemingly interested in such activities being Steve Grimley’s youngest son, four-year old Alex, RedHeads’ next generation winemaker in the making.
With the 5 different tanks of Shiraz we’ve received so far, each has been inoculated with a different yeast to help encourage a plethora of Shiraz styles, and with the same diversity in mind, we’ve also put a lid on one of the vats too.
Wedged between a couple of these tanks is the (wine cooling) fridge plant, which we discovered last week has been the home of a rat, but no-one know how long for, just long enough so it can consume vast quantities of the pipes’ insulation foam.
Cue Macgyvieri* (Andrew Pieri’s V11 name) - Studio Member and RedHeads’ very own Mr Fixit. After a painstaking operation on the fridge plant’s piping yesterday, we all held our breath as we waited to see if the patient emerged this morning fully recovered.
Success!
Adam will be breathing a sigh of relief, La Curio is very dependent on this machine as Adam likes to expose his wines to cold-soaking (especially as the Primitivo will come in a little raisined this year, according to him), so keeping it extra cool for 5-6 days at a hopeful 3-4 degrees celsius will be ideal for him, especially as he believes the pips are a bit green, and so fermentation at a lower temperature should keep those green pip characters at bay.
Well, that’s the plan anyway – thankfully we have total faith in both Macgyvieri’s fixing skills and Adam’s deft winemaking skills...
*Macgyvieri is the merging of Macgyver, the American action-adventure television series with Pieri
You girls absolutely ROCK, I'm a tad partial to a good drop of red, now I know why, it has a "feminine" touch
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, its great how you get in and do the hard yakka, girls really do rock :-)