All vats are grey

Winery work is hard. It's also really time-consuming. Reading about wine-making from textbooks or reference guides, it never really occurs to you just how long every step takes. For the human race, in ancient times, to have discovered how wine is made and then for us to have continually refined the back-breaking process for thousands of years is a true testament to the fact that we are civilised beings and care about things that give pleasure to life rather than just living to survive.

In any case, this post is about the realities of wine-making and not just having the opportunity to put a reference to The Cure in the title, although it was too tempting to resist.

My WSET colleague Nick, who went to Plumpton to study vinification and worked several harvests put it best when he said,"Wine-making is all about long periods of monotonous repetition interspersed with periods of hard work and the odd flash of panic!" The sheer quantities of grapes > juice > wine means that there is some serious time to process everything.
For instance, here are the major steps and approximately how long it takes for each one:

Bringing grapes in via a truck and crushing them in a crusher = 2 tons in ~20-30 minutes

Pressing the juice from the crushed skins, pips and pulp = 2 hours to press a load

Settling (allowing the juice to settle so the solids sink to the bottom and then pumping the clear must to another tank) = 2 days

Racking (actually pumping away the clear juice from the solids, aka the 'lees') =  2 hours for 5,000 litres

Proofing the yeast and adding to the tank = 30 minutes to proof but you have to add nutrients and also possibly acid beforehand to the tanks

Fermenting the must until it's completely dry (very little residual sugar left, which is barely perceptible on the palate) = 7-10 days, and you have to check the sugar levels of each tank every day to gauge how fast it's fermenting

If you decide to ferment any white wines with oak, you need to transfer the fermenting-in-process tank into barrels, which involves pumping your tank of wine into a set quantity of barrels. Every day we do an analysis of a random selection of barrels from each lot to measure how fast fermentation is happening.

 

For reds:

After crushing you directly pump them into overhead tanks, and ferment them, rather than pressing first. Then you start pumping them over (see previous post). Each tank is on average pumped over for 30 minutes, 3 times a day. Jordan has 24 tanks, so it takes about 2 hours to do them all, plus set-up and cleaning. Generally, pump overs takes 3-4 people about 8 hours each day, leaving not much time to do anything else!

 

Repeat pump overs until the wine is dry per vat = usually about 5 days from start to finish for each

Press the red wine = 2 hours, and then transfer it to a tank

If you decide to age any red wine in oak, you pump them into a set number of barrels

That's about where we are now in the harvest although there's a lot more other types of work on the horizon. Imagine doing multiple parts of these steps on a given day! Also, cleaning everything takes quite a long time too. All the equipment needs to be very clean, tidy and hygienic. Jolette said the first day we were in the cellar, 'Wine-making is 90% janitorial work!"

It's been absolutely crazy but we've been managing to get it all done somehow.