Dan's Harvest Updates

Taking the Plunge

Mon 1 Mar 2010

Yesterday was the first of many, many plunges for the 2010 vintage. It was harder than I remember. I guess I'll toughen up over the next few weeks - I'll have to!

Plunging is one of the key activities in red wine production. All the colour and tannin that ends up in the wine is initially found in the grape skins. The alcohol in the fermenting juice is what extracts these tannins from the skins, giving red wines their colour and grip. The problem is that the bubbling carbon dioxide from the fermentation carries all the skins to the top where they form a dense mass called the cap. So, in order to extract the tannins the winemaker needs to periodically mix the skins with the wine. Modern technology can do this by pumping the juice over the cap or by fermenting in a giant concrete-mixer type vessel that mixes the skins into the juice as it rotates. More traditional methods involve plunging the cap directly into the juice. This can be done with a pneumatic plunger or, more traditional still, by foot or by hand.

As you would expect, we go for the most traditional (and incidentally also the most hard work) method. We have gorgeous old wooden hand plungers to use. They are a flat plate a bit bigger than a laptop fixed to the end of a nine foot pole. We use them to break up the cap and push it down into the fermenting juice (there is a pic of me using one on the website). We do this 3-4 times a day for each fermenter. They take about 20 minutes each, so it is a huge part of our work day in the winery over vintage.

In French the term is pigeage (pronounced - peash-arge). Do not Google-image this term because you will be exposed to lots of photos of grubby Frenchmen in their underpants.

See Also: Ask Dan