Learning to Make Wine

March 21st, 2014

The Michelini brothers run Zorzal Winery in Tupungato, Argentina in the Uco Valley just south of Mendoza. They have me to work and learn the process of making wine at their organic winery. I stayed for about two weeks and learned a lot! Thank you community at Zorzal!

Zorzal Bodega sits 50 kilometers from the border of Chile and about 20 kilometers from the Andes Mountains. In the foreground, the grape plants are growing. It takes about 4 years for a plant to grow from seed to be able to harvest. Quite the investment.

Inside of the bodega there are 56 tanks, eggs and bins they use to ferment and store the wine. 350 oak barrels age their selected wines.

Some of the eggs and barrels just outside the bodega

Tano and Daniela take sauvignon blanc grapes from a tank to be pressed. The juice from the press will then be added to the pure juice which will then be made into wine

Daniela, Tano and myself overlook the grapes coming out of the tank. We put dry ice into the bin to deoxidize the juice to keep the juice as fresh as possible. There is a haze, carbon dioxide, that comes up from the bin which pushed the oxygen out of the juice.

Tano watches the dry ice deoxidize the grapes as we transfer the juice from one tank to another

Here we are shoveling the remaining grapes which will be pressed

Omar and Juan toss buckets full of grapes into the grinder which separates the grapes from the stems. Once this process is done, we put the grapes into a tank or bin to begin the fermentation. Some of the eggs are in the background

Here we are transfering the separated grapes from the grinder to a bin to ferment

Tano and I mix these Cabernet Franc grapes to make sure the fermentation goes properly. This process is done daily and sometimes multiple times a day. You can do it by hand, using a suction pump to move juice from the bottom to the top of tanks or by using a  handheld wine press

Everyday we check the density, temperature and taste of the grapes. They do this to monitor that the fermentation is going properly

350 barrels for aging

Botteling. This company botteled 14,000 bottels in two days of Malbec wine. It was incredible to watch them work. They had an assembly line of 6 workers each doing their part. Putting bottels on the rack, making boxes, filling boxes with botteled wine, and putting the filled boxes on pallets to bring to storage.

This is my friend Mara