Our First Crush

After 7 weeks of harvest and 45 straight days of work, I finally have the time to sit down and write my first blog.

Like every start up, City Winery faced some unexpected challenges and some nice surprises during the entire crush period. Fortunately, there was no equipment breakdown, but our machines still needed some fine tuning to literally "fit" into City Winery. The hardest (and funniest) part was when we realized that our 3000 lb grape press could not be moved outside because it could not fit through the new door that had been installed in the winery after the press had been delivered (one of the perils of pressing in a winery that is also a construction site!) We ended up taking the press apart and putting it back together, a process that took 36 hours and lots of improvisation.

One of the biggest concerns for this first year's harvest was the capacity of our grape crops to handle being shipped across the country without damage. To prevent any crushing during the transport, City Winery decided to use the 36lb yellow bins known in the wine industry as FYBs, which are great at protecting the grapes but require a lot of care and cleaning on their own. Also, to prevent any rot or mold during transport, all grapes were picked at night or in the early morning and sent by a refrigerated truck to a cooling facility in Lodi, California, near our shipping facility, so the temperature never went above 37F during the transport to City Winery. However, sorting a crop at 37F is very hard on the fingers, so we decided to cut the "chain of cold" in Connecticut and allowed the grapes to "warm up" to 42-45F a few hours before they were delivered to City Winery. In total the crops spent between 6 to 9 days to get to the winery, and we did not see any signs of rot, mold or juicing due to this shipping: the pre-cooling in Lodi and use of FYB bins worked very well!

Overall we were very impressed by the high quality of the crops we received at City Winery, and this is due to the hard work of our Vineyard Director Sam Spencer, and the high-end vineyards we chose to work with. Sam's knowledge and connections allowed us to select really good blocks of grapes and pick at the optimum time. We also tried hard to respect the characteristics of the specific fruit during winemaking, crushed (using belt conveyors) and barreled by gravity only, and used gentle extraction during maceration. Globally, we had a really good acidity-brix balance and had only to listen the fruit to make our winemaking decisions.

Finally, a special note about our members. Many of you were just as excited about this first harvest as we were, and took time out of your busy schedules to come down and help out during a crush-even the early morning crushes-and have since been often to sample your wine and learn more about the process. I have been very impressed your curiosity and your questions, and now that the harvest is over I look forward to having more time to get to know you, and your wine, on a more individual basis. Please never hesitate to call, email or just stop by-now that the wine is barreled and aging, the fun part (the tasting) has only just begun!