The cellar crew is focused on crushing grapes as they come in from the vineyards. The remaining white grapes will be destemmed, crushed, and pressed. The juice is pumped to receiving tanks where it is allowed to settle for 3–4 days before we increase juice temperature and start to ferment. Our rosés are made in the same way the white wines are made.
The red grapes are destemmed and crushed and then pumped together with skins and seeds to tanks where they will be fermented when the tank temperature rises to about 60°F. Leaving the skins in the juice allows us to extract the color and flavors from the skins. Because pressing is time consuming, red grape processing is much faster and we can handle a larger tonnage each day than we can with white grapes.
