First crush at City Winery
Atlanta’s only urban winery makes their first vintage
A team unloaded six tons of Pinot Noir grapes harvested three days prior from Shokrian Vineyard in Santa Maria, California. Crates holding about 20 pounds each arrived stacked, with not a single cluster crushed. Dominic Burke, the South African head winemaker, handed us a bundle to taste: smallish, dark purple grapes, densely sweet and softer than table grapes with prevalent seeds.
The grapes were dumped by hand into a smallish escalator lovingly referred to as “the giraffe” and then dropped into a destemmer. Inside, a large cylinder spun as paddles rotated, removing stems. Gently squeezed grapes fell through holes while a bin caught the debris, and workers hand-sorted the fallen grapes on the shake table, pulling out bits of leaves or wonky grapes. Juice flowed into buckets and ended up in large square bins.
David Lecomte, City Winery’s chief winemaker, zoomed over in a forklift and swiftly dumped the contents of the bins into five-ton steel tanks for maceration and fermentation. Lecomte, who hails from the Rhone Valley of Southern France, educated us on the pieces and parts that go into the winemaking process. The bin returned to the end of the conveyor belt and we started over with another crate of grapes.
After the primary ferment (two weeks), wine will be pumped into barrels for a year or two of oaky rest. The finished wine will be ready to serve in 2017 and beyond. Wonder who will be headlining City Winery’s stage the day we can clink glasses with Atlanta-made Pinot Noir?