The Vines

Bob the wine guy

Pinot Noir Grapes

BOO!

Picking and Grining

I have a crush

Oh the wine

Grapes from around the NW

The Winery

Caps

All punched down

High cap

It can be thick

0 brix

getting the press ready

Nate pressing

what a mess

wine in the bucket

pressed grapes

Vines from Bob's Vineyard in Oregon City

This is Bob, he is responsible for all this

Grapes a growing

See how great they look :)

Time to pick 450lbs!

Grapes are picked into 5 gallon buckets and taken to the crusher.

Grapes are then loaded into the Crusher/Destemer. This machine seperates the stems from the grapes and breakes the skins of the grapes. This is the real begining of the wine making process since this where juice is starting to be extracted.

Crushed grapes are put in 20gallon fermenters for primary fermentation. Each fermenter holds about 150lbs of grapes and will yeild around 6-8 gallons (30-40 bottles) of finished wine.

We went to Olympia on Saturday and crushed another 450lbs of Pinot Noir and 250lbs of Syrah. These grapes came from Central Washington and the finished product will be very diffrent from the Oregon City wine. We will use these with another 400lbs of grapes to give us 3 diffrent wines to blend together into our finished product.

Eastern Washington Syrah

This is not quite the commercial crusher we used at Bob's but got the job done pretty quick.

The grape "Must" gets a good dose of sulfates to kill any wild yeast and sterilize the must. In 24hrs we will add the yeasts and start fermentation.

This is Dusty Bridge Winery.

Hi-Tech climate control

One proud vintner

Fermenting wine produces a "cap"

This cap has to be "punched" down twice a day for max extraction.

Kind of hard to tell in the picture but the cap is about 10" thick!