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It may seem like the buds just burst, but harvest will be sneaking up on us soon. In preparation for the exciting and hectic season, let’s look at what you can do now to be ahead of the game.

Prior and during harvest, in addition to an influx of customers, you are also dealing with the logistics of the winery – equipment maintenance, prepping tanks, making space for the grapes coming in and all the juice from the crush. After you press off the grapes, the volume shrinks significantly after removing the pomace, but the fermenting grapes are still taking up more space than the wine will. Additionally, you have often just bottled the wine from the previous harvest, which means you have a large quantity of bottled wine stored and taking up space. Soon you’ll have estimates of how many tons of grapes you will actually have this year. Will you have room for it all, or will you end up with empty tanks?

Although harvest is what you’ve been working towards, it also is the time when you are working the longest days. Managing the multiple facets of the business can be challenging. How do you get it all done? How can you leverage every inch of your winery so that you can produce more wine? If you have a 10k gallon winery and you only crush 10k gallons in volume of red grapes with skins, you’ll end up with only around 7-8K gallons of finished wine. To produce 10,000 gallons of red wine, you’ll actually want closer to 13k gallons of grapes fermenting. But if you had room for 13k gallons, you’d be a 13k gallon winery! In some locations, it’s cool enough to do your primary fermentation outside, but in many locations that is not an option.

So how do you ferment the greatest amount of grapes to utilize your entire 10k gallon capacity and actually produce 10k gallons of wine?

1. You could use another facility to do a custom crush.
2. Crush what you can on location and once you have it all pressed and in tanks, you can supplement with bulk wine from another winery.
3. Bring in fruit from another location that harvests later than you do. After your initial press and fermentation has started, you have space that is now open. If you use fruit from multiple regions, you can now bring in more grapes.

Here are a few examples of how some of Premier Wine Blends’ customers have been able to use the full capacity of their tanks:

One winery was looking for a particular variety to blend into one of their wines, but they did not grow this grape themselves or have access to it in the area. We worked with them to harvest & crush at a facility near the selling vineyard so we did not have to transport the grapes very far in the hot temperatures around harvest. Once pressed (a white wine) it fermented for 5 weeks at cool temperatures. When the ambient temperatures had dropped enough, we transported it to their winery. After it arrived, we worked with them to craft a new wine blend at their location.

In another case, the winery knew they wanted grapes and wine from a particular region for a particular style they wanted to make. During this harvest, we leveraged our network of wineries & vineyards to locate bulk wines that became available during crush season because of the abundant harvest that year. We were able to find and transport the wine without having prior contracts in place.

During harvest season last year, one of our clients was a Texas Hill Country winery. The winery harvested grapes and began production from their own vineyard. They pressed off the wine after primary fermentation and into barrels, thereby opening up the winery for another crush. We were then able to locate fruit from the High Plains region and transported it to the Hill Country winery, where it was crushed, allowing them to create blends that they would not have been able to make with only estate grown grapes.

These are just a few ways you can use your winery’s space efficiently, producing more wine, crafting new blends and staying ahead. However, often we see mistakes made that cause owners problems, financial stress and time. Usually it is just because they just didn’t plan ahead. Costs and stress increase the closer you get to harvest, so don’t wait. Put your strategies and network into place soon. Often a month can make a big difference in costs and missed opportunities. If you are thinking about selling, buying or creating new blends this season, we welcome a chat.

Premier Wine Blends provides custom solutions for your winery.
Finely crafted wine blends, consulting and
local premium bulk wine sourcing (because you’re not a Napa winery!)

  1. June 9, 2011

    Great to see someone else reminding wineries to plan ahead! Especially in relation to harvest and ALL the dynamics involved in it.
    Great post.

    Ann

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