Construction for City Winery Chicago is progressing at a rapid pace!
Check out a few photos from the construction site as well as a rendering of the exterior.
Cool fact: City Winery Chicago will be using reclaimed wood from the site for the actual tables in the restaurant as well as re-using brick taken down from the current building throughout the new space.
We’re exciting to introduce the Chicago VinoFile Premier Membership.
With the launch of CityWinery.com 2.0, we are introducing upgrades to our membership rewards program featuring our Virtual Wine & Music Sommelier.™
$75.00 per year (includes a $25 credit for online wine consumption),
No Service Fees for your ticket purchases,
48 hour advance notice on all shows & events,
5% back on all your consumption with a $10 gift card being issued for every $200 in spending onsite,
The Virtual Sommelier™ will watch your wine and music consumption, and based on your ranking of wines, will make recommendations for what you will like. View the information in your private profile on the web or mobile device, and
Your membership will be honored in both City Winery Chicago & New York!
Artist: Mason Jennings
Playing At City Winery: March 29th & 30th – Buy Tickets Here
Q & A With City Winery
You were born in Hawaii and your music has appeared in the surf film Shelter. Do you surf yourself?
No, I don’t surf. Not much opportunity at home in Minnesota. I relate to the culture’s focus on simplicity and closeness with nature, though.
At a young age, your family moved to Pittsburgh and you began playing music. What was/is the music scene like in Pittsburgh?
I am not sure. I moved away at 19 before I ever got involved with a scene there. I came to Minneapolis following bands I loved like The Replacements, The Jayhawks and Prince.
You dropped out of school to move to Minneapolis to pursue your music career. What drew you there?
The bands I just mentioned. And I felt instantly at home in the landscape. I find the seasons intense and beautiful. I’m never in traffic. And there’s great public radio up there.
Your newest album is entitled Minnesota. Is this and ode, of sorts, to your home?
Sure. The theme is probably home but the most similar thing to Minnesota is how much variety there is on the record. The record feels like a collage to me, hence the cover art, and Minnesota has such contrasts as a place too. Freezing winters, hot summers, water and land, art world and back-woodsmandry.
Many of your songs are about love. In fact, on your website your new album Minnesota is described as “a collage of love trying to survive the transition into being a grown-up in a complex world”. What appeals to you about the subject?
Not sure any song about any subject is any good if it’s not about love. Or a longing. All longing seems to be about love in the end.
And how have your ideas about love changed and grown over the course of your songwriting career?
Oh, I’m just more open and hopefully more aware now. I love more deeply now. Being a parent there is much more at risk.
We are proud to announce that City Winery is ranked #48 in Pollstar’s 2011 Worldwide Ticket Sales Top 100 Club Venues– in the WORLD!
A big thanks to all of the talented artists and City Winery patrons for making this happen, and we look forward to another successful year in 2012.
Our Wine not War movement is a shout out to what we feel is important– making and enjoying wine!
Harvest is the perfect time to see what it takes to make great wine in Urban Wine Country; no other time of the year offers the same opportunities. This year, over 100 tons of grapes are arriving from Vineyards in California, Oregon, and Washington State to City Winery and management is adding its voice to New York.
Since inception, City Winery has averaged 75 tons a year of grape production, which yields the equivalent of 250 barrels or 5000 cases of wine from 15 different vineyards. In 2010, City Winery served almost 30% of its production without it ever going into a bottle. City Winery’s cellar holds 300 French oak barrels with 11 tap lines.
In addition to sampling our own array of wines produced on premises, guests may order from City Winery’s wine list of over 400 selections from most major winemaking regions of the world, recognized by Wine Spectator magazine with a ‘Best of Award of Excellence’ in 2010.
An old adage states, “that wine is made in the vineyard” and whilst it is true to an extent, it takes a winery to make great wine. Step inside City Winery and they’ll show you just how it’s done. Make wine not war– four simple words that could change your world.
For winemaking inquiries, please email barrelmember@citywinery.com or call 212-608-0555 ext. 478.
City Winery, which opened in the fall of 2008, has quickly established itself as an innovative brand by uniquely combining the first winery in Manhattan with world-class music programming. With 6 harvests completed (3 from Northern Hemisphere vineyards and 3 spring harvests from south of the equator) more consumers will have an opportunity to taste the high quality of the wine through a unique tap system directly from the cellar below.
Reservations are now available: Click Here for OpenTable.com
City Winery’s cellar holds 300 French oak barrels with 11 tap lines to the newly launched Barrel Room which will serve the fresh wine, as well as being a new 30-seat restaurant within the Winery complex. The Barrel Room features its own menu, designed by our executive chef Andres Barrera, to complement the wine and much of the food is prepared right in front of you. In addition to sampling our own array of wines produced on premises, guests may order from City Winery’s wine list of over 400 selections from most major winemaking regions of the world, recognized by Wine Spectator magazine with a ‘Best of Award of Excellence’ in 2010. “The Barrel Room” is housed inside the building between the company’s fermentation tank room and the music and private event space. The tap system, which uses a neutral argon gas, allows us to serve wine in the “greenest” manner with no need for bottle, cork, label, or cardboard case. Much of the tap wine requires no added sulfites during “kegging” and because of the inert gas the wine is freshly preserved in stainless steel creating no waste from keg to glass.
“The Barrel Room allows us to show off two elements of our business which have matured nicely—namely the high quality of our food AND the delicious wine we have been producing,” said Michael Dorf, founder and CEO of City Winery. ”We are also very excited about giving our customers the rare opportunity of tasting some of our wine using a nontraditional method but getting as close to a barrel tasting of finished wine as possible.”
Since inception, City Winery has averaged 75 tons a year of grape production, which yields the equivalent of 250 barrels or 5000 cases of wine from 15 different vineyards in California, Oregon, New York, Argentina, and Chile. In 2010, City Winery served almost 30% of its production without it ever going into a bottle—the wine when finished with it’s aging process moves from a wooden barrel into a stainless steel keg for tapping straight into a glass. While many micro–breweries and even Whole Foods recently have started selling “Growlers”, riding on both the craft beer market and environmental benefits, the logistics of the wine business have generally not allowed for this. But given City Winery New York is in the heart of a wine consuming urban setting, drinking fresh wine locally is now possible.
David Lecomte, City Winery’s executive winemaker who is originally from the Rhone Valley in France, comments, “The tap system allows us to introduce small batches of wine down to a single barrel. We can demonstrate on one tap line Pinot Noir from Oregon aged in new oak for 1-year against the same vineyard’s Pinot aged in used oak, press wine versus free run wine, American oak versus French oak, barrel aging versus stainless steel tank aging. For a wine aficionado, this chance to learn and taste the differences is rare and exciting.”
City Winery plans to open in Chicago in the spring of 2012 in a new 25,000 square foot location with approximately the same winery capacity and even expanded tap wine tasting room. Putting a winery into the heart of a city allows for the fresh product to get to wine fans in a unique and efficient manner. City Winery expects to increase the amount of wine delivered in this way to almost 50% of its production in the future, as well as expand to additional urban markets.
Kosher Assistant Winemaker Yanky Drew pressed two puncheon barrels of kosher Pinot Noir grapes today.
Check out the video above for a look at how Yanky emptied the puncheons to get the pressing started.
After all of the juice flowed out, Yanky emptied the barrel of its grapes using a metal tool (as seen pictured above).
The small batch of Pinot Noir grapes was placed in the winery’s basket press and voila, there was pressed wine! (For more background on pressing, learn how to press red wine grapes here.)
After the pressing, the dry pomace (pictured above) wasn’t as dry as usual — because the batch was small, the piston wasn’t able to fully compress the grapes. We lost out on a little bit of wine, but rest assured, you’ll be drinking some quality kosher wine when we bottle this next season.
Cheers to that!
Video courtesy of wine aficionado Henry Gonzalez. Photos courtesy of Henry Gonzalez and Erica Swallow
City Winery and its team are quite diverse, partially due to the winery’s situation in downtown New York City, but also based on the winery’s multi-purpose use as a winery, entertainment venue, restaurant and tasting room.
Each week, we update you on the latest goings on at the winery. But we thought it’d be nice to take a glance back at some of the unique traits of our winery with a few fun facts about us. We hope you find these facts about our winemaking as interesting as we do!
1. When lees (that is, deposits of dead or residual yeast and other particles that precipitate to the bottom of a tank of wine after fermentation and aging) is removed from a wine at City Winery, we recycle it to the kitchen, where white lees is used to make pizza dough and red lees is used to make pretzels. Really dark lees can also be used to paint barrels.
2. City Winery’s Assistant Winemaker Bill Anton was a horse jockey for 20 years before joining the wine world!
3. We don’t “crush” grapes at City Winery. Instead, we simply destem and sort grapes before they are placed in tanks. This helps us maintain the integrity of the fruit as much as we can in order to optimize fresh aromas in the wine.
4. Press wine makes up about 25% of City Winery’s red wine production.
5. City Winery produces a number of kosher wines each year. The kosher winemaking process is overseen by the winery’s Kosher Assistant Winemaker Yanky Drew.
6. The Winery’s Barrel Room uses a house wine tap system to funnel up wines from the winery’s wine cellar. The system employs 11 taps and enables the winery to serve fresh wines on site.
7. At City Winery, we top barrels every 2-3 weeks to prevent oxidation. During the topping, we use the same variety of the wine being topped.
8. The City Winery team bottles and labels all wines on site. In fact, our in-house designer creates all of the wine labels used on our house and barrel member wines.
9. One barrel of wine fills 21 cases — that’s 252 bottles of delicious wine!
10. Because City Winery is located in Manhattan, it cannot be situated on a vineyard. Instead of growing our own grapes, we source grapes from some of the finest vineyards in California, New York, Chile and Argentina.
What else would you like to know about City Winery? Let us know in the comments below.
The City Winery team has been busy pressing wines for the past week or so.
Pressing occurs after primary fermentation, when a winemaker determines if the young wine has reached its full potential and is ready to be pressed.
In short, pressing takes place once a wine is dry — that is, the free run wine has no more sugars to be fermented.
There are two types of wines that are produced during this stage of winemaking:
Take a look at the video above and the pictures below for a tutorial on how to press red wine grapes and let us know if you have questions in the comments below!
The first step of pressing wine is bleeding the tank of all final liquid, also known as the free run wine.
Free run wine is generally the highest quality wine, as it is the most aromatically elegant and has the cleanest mouthfeel, as it does not have the cloudiness brought about by lees in press wine.
After all of the free run wine is bled out, the tank is opened and all of the wet pomace — the grape skin, seeds and stems left in the tank — is removed.
If a good bleed is administered, a block of wet pomace will flow out when the tank is opened. If not, a fountain of juices will flow out — this could result in the loss of wine, as it could spew everywhere.
Once the tank is opened, it is necessary for someone to enter the tank and shovel out the pomace. That person enters through the bottom of the tank, instead of the top of the tank, so that it is certain that he or she can get out of the tank again. As a result, a hole needs to be dug in the pomace so that he or she can enter.
At City Winery, we have a modest ventilation and lighting system set up so that the person inside can see and is able to breathe, given the large amount of carbon dioxide within the tank.
Once the pomace is shoveled into the basket press, it it transported with a forklift to the crushpad, where the press will take place.
There are four types of wine presses — City Winery uses a basket press to press its red wines. Wikipedia explains the basket press quite eloquently:
“A basket press consists of a large basket that is filled with the [fermented] grapes. Pressure is applied through a plate that is forced down onto the fruit. The mechanism to lower the plate is often either a screw or a hydraulic device. The juice flows through openings in the basket. The basket style press was the first type of mechanized press to be developed, and its basic design has not changed in nearly 1000 years.”
City Winery sets its press for two pressure points during the press: a light press and a hard press.
The light press and hard press wines, as well as the free run wines, are all kept separate, because they generally have very different taste profiles.
Free run wine is fruity and aromatic, and as you press deeper into the fruit, the resulting press wines have increased tannins and mouthfeel.
Press wines are generally put back into the tank to ferment, because they contain residual sugars that need to be fermented. Typically press wines 1 to 0 Brix (the U.S. unit for Specific Gravity) — wines are “dry” (no sugar) at -1 to -2 Brix. This final fermentation process takes a few days to complete. The winery team closely watches the end of the fermentation stage and can warm up the tank to help the existing yeast finish the fermentation.
When both the free run and press wines are dry (without sugars), they are tasted separately, and the winemaker decides if he’d like to keep the three varied wines separate or blend them.
When free run wine is well-balanced, the winemaker keeps it separate. If the tannins are too tight or the wine has a light mid-palate, though, the press wine is usually blended in.
The decision on whether to blend or not is “based uniquely on the taste of the wine,” says Winemaker David Lecomte. He noted that from a practical point of view, it would make sense to blend all of the wines together, so that his team wouldn’t have to track the wines in separate lots.
However, the focus is on making the best wines possible, so blending is based on taste, not logistics. In a case where the team is unsure of whether there is an interest in blending back the press wines with the free run, they run a blind tasting, as not to be influenced by the practicalities of running a winery.
The likelihood of blending often depends on the varietal, Lecomte noted. With Cabernet Sauvignon, he often ends up blending the light press back, because a light mouthfeel can be problematic, as he’s going for a dark fruit and jam feel.
With Pinot Noir, the emphasis is on aromatic freshness and elegance, though, and the varietal can show beautifully without a long finish or mouthfeel — as a result, the press wine is usually not blended back in.
When all of the pressing is finished, the dry pomace remaining is the press is removed and disposed of.
And voila, you’re closer to a finished wine product!
Images courtesy of Hank Smeal, cellar intern
The harvest season is upon us, and the winery team is busy receiving grapes and bottling wines from previous vintages.
For a look into our world, check out the video embedded above, shot and edited by one of our wine aficionados, Henry Gonzalez.
The diversity of the City Winery winemaking team reflects the diversity of New York City, where the winery is situated. Our head winemaker has been in the industry since he was 16 years old, while the assistant winemaker fell into the wine world after retiring from his 20-year career as a jockey.
To make things even more interesting, the winery’s cellar hand doesn’t drink wine (or any alcohol for that matter) and grew up in Mali and France. And finally, the kosher assistant winemaker jumped into the wine world as a home winemaker, out of a love for the drink.
So, just who are these unique individuals behind City Winery? I spoke with each of the core team members to learn just how they found themselves in the wine industry. Here are their stories.
Head Winemaker David Lecomte took on his first job in the wine industry as a teenager. David grew up in Tain-l’Hermitage, France, a town in the northern Rhône valley. His hometown economy was supported largely by wine production, followed by fruit farming. David said that a wine job, as a result, was just a common job in his area.
So, at 16 years old, David took on a summer job in the vineyards of Delas & Fils Sons, and after two years, he worked his way up to a winery position. Since then, he’s worked with Dragon Seal, Jean Luc Colombo, Chapoutier & Fils, Afton Mountain Vineyards, Premium Wine Group and Herzog Wine Cellars; and in 2008, he joined as the founding winemaker at City Winery.
David’s favorite part of working as a winemaker is when he has a huge diversity of crop coming into the winery. Having a diversity of metrics helps keep him on his toes, as he’s constantly thinking of how to work with each individual wine.
The biggest challenge of winemaking in an urban environment, though, is utilizing a small space to its fullest without compromising the winemaking. Even more problematic is the fact that it is impossible for the winery to be located near the vineyards, as it’s in the heart of New York City. For a classical winemaker, it’s a big challenge, but David says he has grown accustomed over the years, especially since he is “surrounded by great people” who manage the vineyard relationships in Oregon and California, where he is unable to see the grape vines and make on-the-fly decisions.
For the majority of his career life, Assistant Winemaker Bill Anton was a horse jockey, focusing on racing on the east coast of the United States. His love of wine began in his early 20′s, when he happened to compete on the west coast for a few years. A couple of owners, trainers and associates of his were interested in the wine world, and they all toured around Napa wineries together. It was there when he first began to take an interest in the winemaking process.
Furthermore, Bill has always enjoyed cooking, and his general interest in wine has always been intertwined with his passion for cooking. In fact, Bill believes that “A meal without wine is like a meal with a missing ingredient.” He enjoys every dinner with wine, “even if it’s a pizza,” he says.
Once Bill retired from his career as an athlete, he attended the Florida Culinary Institute to pursue his passion for cooking. At the end of the program, he took a course on food and wine pairing, reigniting his interest in wine.
From there, Bill happened upon an ad in a Long Island newspaper, posted by a winery searching for harvest help. He was employed with that winery, Castello di Borghese, for two harvest seasons. Afterwards, he accompanied the winemaker from Pindar Vineyards (in Long Island) to be his assistant winemaker at Childress Vineyards in North Carolina.
Bill heard about the opening of City Winery and began contacting the winery before it opened. He was fascinated with the idea of urban winemaking. At the time, the winery didn’t have an opening, but during the harvest of 2009, it brought Bill on as the assistant winemaker.
Bill’s favorite part of winemaking is that “every year brings a different challenge. Two years are never the same.” Furthermore, he loves to see the end product after the process of seeing it go from a juice to a high quality wine. On the flip side of the coin, Bill agrees with David that the most difficult aspect of urban winemaking is dealing with space constraints. When you’re restricted to a small space, the winemaking process becomes much more complicated, he says.
Kosher Assistant Winemaker Yanky Drew says his passion for wine goes a long way back, especially since wine is used quite often in Judaism.
“As a kid, I always tried to turn table grapes into wine,” he says. “As you can guess, I was not too successful. But when somebody was making wine, I was there to help. My real turning point was at Yarden Winery in the Golan Heights in Israel. I tasted their Gewürztraminer in the tasting room and was instantly hooked with the barrel rooms, vineyards and so on.”
Yanky’s passion for wine drove him to be a home winemaker, tweeting and reading tweets about winemaking. And it was through Twitter that he came to know of City Winery. “I met the previous City Winery Mashgiach, Ilan Tokayer, may his memory be blessed, through our shared tweeting. He then told me about the vacancy [at City Winery].”
For Yanky, winemaking is all about the love of the process. “What I enjoy the most about the wine world is people who have a real passion for winemaking and produce great wine for all to enjoy,” he says. “I also appreciate when wine tastes like the variety that it is, in other words, true to its variety. What I like the least about the wine world is producing and selling wine just for the business aspect of it — and people who don’t care to make good wine, only to make money.”
Cellar Hand Sikou Nikate was born in Mali, Africa and spent half of his life there before moving to France, where many of his family members live.
While Sikou doesn’t drink alcohol, including wine, he enjoys the winemaking process and working with wine.
Prior to working at City Winery, Sikou worked at a Japanese restaurant in France. He heard about the position at City Winery through a friend that works at the winery. While he didn’t have a specialization in wine before applying, the winery was a great fit for him, he says. He enjoys the people and the work.
Sikou began working as the cellar hand at City Winery during the harvest season of 2009.
The City Winery winemaking team works hard every day to make sure the winery is producing top-notch wines. With diverse backgrounds, each of the team members adds his own unique flair to the process.
Let us know if you have any questions about the crew in the comments below!
“Maceration management is the most complex and critical stage of red winemaking,” City Winery winemaker explains. He continues:
“The best way to manage maceration is to adapt yourself every day for every tank and to see each tank as its own person or batch. Every day, every tank is behaving differently. Not coming in for one day would cause me to lose sight of what’s going on.”
Maceration is the process through which the solid part of the must — including the grape skin, seeds and pulp — comes in contact with the liquid content — the grape juice and young wine — to impart the desired color and amounts of tannins and aromas to the juice.
During this stage of winemaking, it is important to facilitate the right amount of solid and liquid contact, so that maceration is optimized.
There’s only one pesky thing that gets in the way: carbon dioxide. As sugars in the juice are converted to alcohol during fermentation, carbon dioxide is created as a byproduct. The gas rises to the top of the vessel, pushing the solid materials — including grapes, seeds and pulp — to the top of the container, creating a solid block of fruit, known as the cap (as pictured above).
The cap has a tendency to dry out if it’s not redistributed into the juice, causing maceration to slow to a halt.
Lecomte says that one tank produces 20-22 times its volume in carbon dioxide during fermentation. At City Winery, we use a carbon dioxide extractor, which constantly pulls CO2 out of the tanks and into the winery. To keep the winery ventilated, we keep the dock door open when the extractor is on.
The wines are constantly changing during this period. With such rapid change in the wine, maceration management takes over during this time of year, pacing the staff’s work flow, as pumping over and punching down needs are high.
3 Ways to Manage Maceration
There are three methods for maceration management: punching down, pumping over and rack & return. Lecomte explained each method thoroughly — here’s an overview:
1. Punching Down: The first way to integrate the cap back into the juice is punching down, a method very common in the Burgundy and Rhône wine regions of France. Punching down is when the cap is manually or mechanically pushed back into the juice from the top. Feet, a punch down tool or a hydraulic piston can be used to punch down. At City Winery, we use a punch down tool (as pictured above).
Punching down can only be completed when an open-top tank is being used. The team places a wooden beam across the lip of the tank and gets to work with the punch down tool, using the beam to step on for balance.
During the beginning phase of maceration, so much carbon dioxide is produced that the cap is strong enough to walk on. We wouldn’t recommend trying that, though, because one slip into the juice could be fatal. Death is highly likely if a person falls into a fermenting tank of wine, because the carbon dioxide is so strong that it is impossible to breath, even in the case that you get your head above the cap quickly.
2. Pumping Over: Pumping over is when liquid from the bottom of the tank is transferred to the top of the tank to submerge the cap. Generally, this is done through two methods. In the first method, a hose is connected to a spout at the bottom of the tank and pushes wine through a pump and into a second hose that sprays the wine onto the cap (as pictured above).
In the other method of pumping over, the wine is emptied through the bottom spout into a tub, so that it can aerate. As the tank is emptied, a hose connecting to a pump siphons the juice through to a second hose that sprays it onto the cap. In both instances, the same tools are used, but the only differing step is aeration.
When a wine has reduced — which is detected by the smell of sulfur, rotten eggs, onion or boiled cauliflower, depending on the level of reduction — it needs air. In this case, the team will use the air method (as pictured above) when pumping over.
3. Rack & Return: The last type of maceration management is called “rack & return” and it’s a new method that’s starting to appear in the Bordeaux wine region of France. This method is uncommon, though, as it requires the availability of two tanks. Racking is the process of carefully moving wine from one place to another. In this case, half of the wine in a tank is moved to another tank and then returned to the original tank at a high velocity using a pump at full speed, causing the cap to break up.
With pumping over, wine can only be pumped as fast as it is flowing out of the tank — that way, it’s replacing the tank at the same rate. For example, today we’re using a pump at 40% its capacity — it can pump up to 120-gallon per minute. This is all based on the flow of the wine from the tank.
With the rack & return method, though, all of the juice in the second tank can be pumped at full speed into the original tank, overwhelming and breaking up the cap. This method enables a winemaker to extract the most character from the solids in the must and can be employed when pumping over isn’t enough. This method, though, would very rarely be used at the end of fermentation, because too much extraction would occur, pushing the wine into a bitter, aggressive state.
Variables to Consider in Maceration Management
Maceration takes about 2-3 weeks, and it’s a balance — the winemaker wants to extract as much potential from the solid materials in the wine as possible. If he extracts for too long, though, the wine can become bitter, harsh or too aggressive, because it begins to extract tannins from the seed, and not just the skin.
If he extracts for too little time, though, the wine may not be as complex as it could be, generally producing a more fruit-forward, than complex, wine.
In general, pumping over and punching down occurs once or twice per day, but can take place as much as 3-4 times per day at the peak of fermentation.
So, how does a winemaker know when he should pump over or punch down? Or whether he should use air to oxygenate the wine during the pump over process? Lecomte says there are a number of variables, of which these are just a few for starters:
Lecomte explained that while two wines can have the same Brix reading, for example, they may be behaving completely differently, so the day-to-day maceration management of each will be different. All of the variables listed above — and more — must be taken into account when dealing with each tank.
Maceration is a complicated process, and this post is merely an introduction to how the City Winery manages this phase of winemaking. Let us know if you have any particular questions in the comments below!
The City Winery team has been busy receiving tons (literally) of grapes for the harvest season — in the past two weeks, we’ve received 21 tons of grapes to sort and destem!
Now is the perfect time to explain exactly what happens during the “crush,” as it is commonly called. I spoke with City Winery Winemaker David Lecomte to get all the details.
First off, the term “crush” is misleading, David explains — at City Winery, we don’t crush our grapes, so that we can maintain the integrity of the fruit as much as we can in order to optimize fresh aromas in the wine. Instead, we simply destem and sort grapes before they are placed in tanks.
The majority of the wine industry crushes grapes when they are received. The only constraint that makes crushing necessary is the need for must — freshly pressed grape juice that contains the skins, seeds and stems of the fruit — to be transported through hoses from the crushpad — where the crushing takes place, usually outside the winery — to tanks. In order to push the grapes through the hose without clogging, there needs to be a fair amount of liquid.
Some wineries build their crushpads at higher elevations than where the tanks are located in order to take advantage of gravity. In this case, the must simply flows through the hoses and into the tanks as aided by gravity — instead of the other option, where the hose is ran up the side of the tank, which can stand at sometimes 30 to 50 feet tall, making a pump necessary to transport the must up to the tank’s opening.
High-end and smaller wineries are able to mitigate crushing, and even some large wineries take precautions to minimize crushing. Some buy special, large-diameter hoses that enable easier transportation of must, and others simply minimize the length of the pipe needed to transport must. Both of these methods reduce clogging and make it easier for whole berries to be sent through a hose — therefore, crushing may not be necessary.
In other cases, some wineries place sorted berries into vessels that are lifted and emptied into tanks. This operation must be planned from the building of the winery, though, as lifting tons of grapes isn’t an easy task.
David noted that in France, his home country, there is no such term as “crush” to explain this process in winemaking. It is simply called “harvest” or “reception,” because grapes are received or harvested, not crushed.
At City Winery, we follow this idea and have a setup that enables us to only use conveyor belts to transport fruit during the destemming and sorting processes. Each tank has its own setup guidelines, custom for its size and location in the winery.
Once a load of grapes is received, we line up the bins of grapes outside the winery’s loading dock and bring them in to the winery piecemeal.
From there, the grapes are loaded onto the first conveyor belt, which carries grapes to the destemmer and is generally manned by two people. One person is in charge of dumping grapes into the hopper at the bottom of the belt, and the second is tasked with evenly loading the conveyor belt rungs with grapes (as pictured above).
It is important that grapes be loaded evenly onto the first conveyor belt, so that the destemmer can work as efficiently as possible. Incoming grapes push grapes in the destemmer out onto the sorting table. Clogging can occur if too many grapes are loaded into the destemmer — and conversely, if too little grapes are loaded into the destemmer, they won’t supply enough force to push out the grapes in the machine, causing the team to lose time and efficiency.
Once the grapes fall onto the sorting table, the team takes one last look at the fruit to ensure that they are of top-notch quality. All remaining stems are removed, and expert sorters, such as our winemaker and assistant winemaker, are experienced enough to pick out grapes that are diseased or under-ripe.
After grapes pass the sorting table, they are transported up another conveyor belt into the tank, where maceration and fermentation take place.
After the must is sent to the tank, it ideally goes through a cold soak, in which it is chilled at around 45 degrees. This process holds off the fermentation process and is meant to increase the amount of fresh aromas present in the fruit. At City Winery, the cold soak lasts for up to a week, but typically good fruit gets 3-4 days in a cold soak, as determined by the winemaker. For troublesome crops, though, that may be in danger of oxidizing or molding, the cold soak is skipped and fermentation starts as soon as the crop warms up, which generally takes about one day.
Some wineries implement a 10-day cold soaking period, with the belief that longer cold soaks yield more aromatic fruits. While difficult to prove, it may very well be true. However, in an urban winemaking environment such as ours, where space is limited, we have to think about logistics. The winemaker is constantly planning out when crops are coming in and when he will need to vacate tanks in order to receive new crops.
David noted that the most critical part of early-stage winemaking is choosing the date of press. The decision to stop maceration — the process by which the grape skins impart the desired color and amounts of tannins and aromas to the juice — in order to press is made no sooner than 24 hours in advance of the press.
Each day, the juices are monitored to make sure they are developing well and are not in danger of oxidation — when the winemaker finally feels that he has gotten everything he wants in his wines from the maceration and fermentation processes, he presses it.
That, my friends, is an overview of how City Winery destems and sorts its grapes. Let us know if you have questions in the comments below!
Photos courtesy of Hank Smeal, cellar intern
Last week, Kosher Assistant Winemaker Yanky Drew and his helper Chananya Zirkind were busy overseeing the harvesting and pressing of Chardonnay grapes sourced from North Fork, Long Island, to be used in making a sparkling wine.
I spoke with Yanky to better understand the ins and outs of kosher winemaking and the specifics of the harvesting, pressing and racking processes in particular. Check out the video embedded above for a look at the process, and then read on for details about each step.
The Two Tenets of Kosher Winemaking
Yanky explained that there are two main tenets when making kosher wine:
These two principles are the foundation of all kosher winemaking and guide how Yanky and his team operate when producing wine with City Winery.
Cleaning the Press
Yanky and Chananya spent three hours cleaning the press in preparation for the grapes. They used a tweezer-like tool to individually pick out all of the seeds and skin from a previous pressing session. The press has to be completely clean of other fruit that may not be kosher. After all of the fruit was removed, the duo powerwashed the press for good measure.
In general, the rule regarding equipment and vessels used in kosher winemaking is that if it is to be used for storage, it must be kosher, but if it is used for anything but storage (such as transportation), it just needs to be completely clean.
For example, hoses used for moving wine from one vessel to another do not need to be kosher — they must only be clean. However, a tank for aging wine must be a designated kosher vessel.
Picking the Grapes
Grapes used for kosher winemaking can be picked by anyone, and the vineyards do not have to follow any kosher procedures. The only considerations are how old the vines are and what other foods are grown in the area.
Vines must be at least three years of age, and the grapes must not be grown in the same field as other fruits or vegetables. Yanky made sure of this when he visited the vineyard, located in North Fork, Long Island.
Furthermore, if any machinery is used — such as a forklift — it must be operated by an observant Jew. In this case, Yanky manned the forklift.
Pressing the Grapes
This time around, Yanky and Chananya pressed Chardonnay grapes for a sparkling wine.
In maintaining kosher standards, only observant Jews are able to handle the product. Along with keeping kosher standards in the pressing process, though, general winemaking procedures must also be followed in order to produce a high-quality wine. For this press, the team needed to follow sparkling wine pressing protocols, which call for a light, delicate press with many cycles, whether kosher or not.
Racking the Grapes
Racking is the process of carefully moving wine from one place to another.
When a wine is pressed, the first racking occurs when the pressed juice is transported to vessels. Sometimes this happens within a winery, but in this case, it happened at an off-site facility in Long Island. In this case, the wine was racked directly into vessels pre-loaded in Yanky’s van. (Check it out in the video above; it’s quite a site!)
Yanky’s vessels for transportation were all designated kosher. He used two 60-gallon drums, one 15-gallon keg and one 5-gallon glass carboy.
“Kosher Tape” Seals the Deal
To make sure that only observant Jews have access to the kosher wine, Yanky uses “kosher tape” — which is distributed by the Orthodox Union, the supervising agency that oversees the procedures for creating kosher wine — to seal all storage vats, taps and valves. This ensures that only he touches the wine, as a tampered seal will prove otherwise.
Yanky also uses the tape to seal off power switches during racking when a pump is necessary. Only he can turn off the power to the pump.
Kosher winemaking may seem like a mystery for those not well-versed in kashrus, the set of Jewish dietary laws. So, let us know in the comments if you have questions about kosher wines.
I have always been a big supporter of tap wines, and it just makes sense for City Winery to serve fresh and good wines by using this technique, being that there are a number of benefits to this system.
We launched our unique tap system with three wine taps in Spring 2009. The winery upgraded to five taps in Spring 2010, and in Summer 2011, the system was upgraded to 11 taps total with the launch of the winery’s Barrel Room.
City Winery probably sells the most volume of tap wine out of all wineries and wine bars on the East Coast.
In Europe, bulk wine “vin en vrac” does not always carry the connotation of poor quality. When you know the right spot and the right wine (either local wineries or a wine shop), buying bulk wine is often a good way to get pleasant everyday wines for a great price. Wine by the tap is similar, but for a winemaker it opens many doors.
Here are some of the benefits behind the tap system.
Lower stress: Wines by the tap do not need to be bottled!! One of the worst tasks for any winemaker is bottling; there are always last-minute problems (not enough glass, not enough labels, incorrect labels, not enough staff, wine plugging during the final filtration, the threat of microbial infection during bottling, equipment breakdowns, etc.). During the winemaking process, we work hard caring for the wines. We witness our wines fermenting and maturing in front of us. This evolution is usually slow and we can influence it if it goes awry. All our attention and care provided over 6 to 18 months can be wasted if we encounter any problems during bottling. No bottling makes our lives easier — I think we can all agree on that!
Minimal SO2: When bottling a wine, most wineries will increase the SO2 content to prevent any chance of microbial infection during bottling and to preserve the wine after bottling — Recall the obvious sulfite odor found in many recently bottled sweet white wines, such as German Riesling. I do not add sulphite before “kegging” any of our tap wines. The wine is stored at 60F and covered with inert argon. We simply don’t need to do anything more to protect the wine.
Truth In wine: Given the wine’s character (our Sauvignon Blanc did not go through malo-latic fermentation), we would have to sterile filter the wine in order to bottle it safely. Such a tight filtration would damage the wine (decrease richness and potentially induce some dryness), but it would be necessary to insure stability of the wine in the long run. Tap wines, however, do not need filtration.
Greener product: With tap wines, there are no supplies (cork, label, foil, bottle, boxes) to purchase, receive and store. As a result, there is no waste, and this product is much greener than traditional bottling. This is a big deal!
Reduced wine losses: There is no need to worry about an oxidized bottle opened last week or unsatisfied customers complaining that our wine is corked. Because it doesn’t go through the bottling process, this isn’t a concern.
More fun / unique wines: There are always some small batches of wine that are odd, but interesting somehow. They are usually light or hard press wines kept separate from the classic free run wines. We are speaking about 15 to maybe 60 gallon lots. In these cases, bottling these small volumes is unrealistic, because bottling costs are high and because there wouldn’t be enough product to market with so few cases. However, with the tap system, we can feature such a wine on tap as a special “barrel/ keg of the week.”
Fewer worries: You can’t even imagine how many ways a wine can go bad in bottle. It rarely happens because we take great care to prevent any potential chemical instability (protein and tartaric precipitation for whites, copper case and color instability for reds, TCA/corked bottles) or microbial instabilities (re-fermentation in bottle, Brettanomyces development in bottle). For example, our Sauvignon Blanc has some fresh aromas of citrus, hawthorn with a lively month feeling — it may not be tartaric stable, meaning than a few harmless tartaric crystals might appear (tartaric crystals do not change the wine’s taste but their appearance may make the wine unmarketable). I do not have to worry about this, though, because the wine is stored at 60F in the cellar and is chilled down to service temperature en route to the tap. Even if a few crystals appear, they will remain in the bottom of the kegs.
Wine education: We can also build educational value from our wines by the tap. For example, we could offer the same wine aged in French vs. American oak barrels to guests. The tap system also enables us a unique way to feature wine in wine flights for educating clients.
Wines by the tap make sense for City Winery. This system enables us to prepare our house wines with minimal winemaking intervention: no filtration (or light one if needed), no fining for white wine, no SO2 addition before kegging.
Basically our wines are closer to their true nature — raw.
This system also offers a unique experience for our guests. While other wine-by-the-tap programs are appearing in sophisticated cities at restaurant and retails shops, they cannot offer what City Winery does: We produce wines on site in SoHo. We can take risks others cannot. We can offer one keg of unique wine if it is tasting great on a given week. We can offer a wine at different stages of its life. We can serve our wines fresh and alive since we don’t have to stabilize them for shipment across the continent.
Whether on tap, from a barrel or in bottle, we hope you’ll enjoy a glass of good wine soon. And stop by our Barrel Room to try out some of City Winery’s tap wines.
Winos everywhere have been huddling in their cellars this week to watch the latest iteration of a meme known as “Downfall” or “Hitler Reacts,” which is based on a pinnacle scene in Der Untergang (2004), a German WWII drama.
The bloggers over at Red to Brown Wine Review uploaded a wine-centric spoof this week, as a reaction to legendary wine critic Robert Parker’s announcement that he would no longer be covering California, in order to focus solely on Bordeaux and the Rhone.
The parody illustrates how “one Californian winery was not particularly happy with this news.”
Check out the video embedded above to share in on the giggles and belly laughs that have thus far only been heard behind cellar walls.