For the southern hemisphere vintage I approached a
number of wineries in South Africa, Australia, Argentina and Chile, and was
happy to get a response from Delegat’s, Oyster Bay in New Zealand. I applied
for their vintage Cellar hand position at their Hawks Bay winery. After a tough
phone interview, I was offered the position starting work on the 20th
February 2012.
After a long (36 hours) flight from London via
Tokyo to Napier on the North Island of New Zealand, I got to Hawks Bay, where I
started work.
Harvest this year has been the wettest in 20 years
particularly in Hawks Bay. Not a great start!!!
Eventually the weather turned onto our side.
Harvest began with a vintage crew of 9, from all over the world including
California, France, UK Italy and Spain. As harvest was underway we where
allocated our harvest positions by Sam Brondel, cellar master/winemaker at
Delegat’s. I was given day shift,
so pleased!! My duty was running the Crush Pad, which consisted of a 25
tonne-tipping bin, Destemmer, Crusher and a Must Pump. As harvest was
under way, all 1800 tones primarily consisting of Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio
and a little bit of Sauvignon Blanc arrived from Delegat's largest vineyard,
Crownthorpe. (320ha)
The grapes would arrive and be processed through
the crush pad and start the press cycle. Once the press cycle was in full operation,
the press operator on taste would make three different cuts - "free
run", "light press" and "hard press". These three cuts
would be put into different tanks and go through a cold settling process before
eventually being blended together.
 |
| Me my Crush Pad, Chardonnay grapes being processed ready to be made for our Oyster Bay Sparkling wine. |
As harvest was the wettest on record this year,
botrytis was the biggest concern, as it gives off dusty flavours in the
wine. This is of course a concern for all wine makers. To eradicate these flavours, the use of activated
carbon as a fining agent is used.
In order to determine how much carbon to use to ameliorate botrytis
flavours, we prepared small carbon fining trials in 100ml of wine, with
different dosage rates, e.g. - 0.1g/l, 0.2g/l, 0.3g/l and 0.4g/l. With 0.1g/l taking out very little
colour and a little dusty botrytis characteristics and with 0.4g/l taking out
much more of both.
Due to the poor
weather and botrytis being an issue this year, high levels of laccase occur (as Laccase is found in botrytis.) With high levels of laccase wine tends to
oxidise and therefore gives the wine a brown tint.
Here at Delegat´s I
learnt how to remove this problem. They do not use pasteurisation, which by
definition is the killing of micro flora by taking the wine to 80°C for 30
seconds, then rapidly cooling to <20°C, although this is a common practice
in the wine industry world. However here at Delegat´s Hawks Bay we worked to
inactivate the polyphenoxidase enzyme laccase (only heated the wine to 60°C for
30 seconds then rapidly cooling to <20°C). This was a really effective way
and was really interesting seeing how all this worked!
Even with the tough weather conditions we had here
at Delegat’s, thanks to these techniques we where able to produce wines that
had clean, fresh fruit flavour and long term stability. I look forward to seeing
my vintage on the shelves!
Here are some more pictures of the Cellar/
Winery.
See you soon!!
