Making Champagne and Pinot Noir

Picking might be done, but the vintage isn't. I spent the morning in the winery with Jules, cleaning presses, water blasting until every little seed was out of the cages, and setting up the press for next season. When we got down into the winery, first we had to clean the floors, because there were footprints all through the cellar and the winery, which was annoying for both Jules and me. We cleaned it together though, a bit like curling, me sweeping with the broom and Jules washing it away, then finishing off with the squeegee.

The art of racking is something I've properly got my hands into today. Racking is taking the clear juice off the lees, leaving the lees behind, which keeps the wine fresh and elegant. From there we blended two tanks of the same juice, from the same plot, into one. Every tank gets treated exactly the same way, right down to the yeast, there's one batch made up and used to inoculate everything, so the house character comes through consistently across the whole range rather than changing tank by tank. That way the terroir shows through, and it's only later that decisions get made on which wine suits which cuvée. We fed a fermenting wine with a nitrogen addition too, still need to confirm exactly what that was.

The wines come down from the reception area into the basement winery, get racked off the clear juice, then racked and blended together, and I'm properly confident using the pump myself now, which I was really proud of.

Making Pinot Noir

The season's been so good, no disease pressure and plenty of good berries, that there was enough quality Pinot Noir to pull some aside and make one red as a bonus. This only happens when conditions allow it and there's enough good juice to spare. Where the champagne juice all gets that one big inoculation for consistency, this red is being left to ferment on wild yeast instead, nothing added, and Jules is running it himself. It's going well so far, though he's understandably a bit nervous carrying that kind of risk. He mentioned "five seven six" for it, five days cold maceration, seven days full ferment, six days on skins, and we've been doing gentle pump overs on it to keep the wine elegant.

So really, harvest hasn't finished for me at all. There's still a full week of winery work ahead looking after the ferments.