Over the last two weeks I've been here, we've spent quite a few days in the cantina. As I wrote in my post about the grape harvest, the grapes for red wine are de-stemmed and pumped into oak vats to ferment. After about two weeks, it's time to remove the grape skins from the wine and start to age it. Large producers do this with a machine, but Potentino uses an old-fashioned hand press.
After we pump out all of the wine we can, we're left with the soggy skins at the bottom of the vat.
At this point, someone gets inside the vat and starts filling buckets with the skins, which are tossed into the press. Someone stands inside the press and stomps on the skins.
This is different from the other kind of stomping, which was to crush the fresh grapes. This time, we're just trying to get at much in each press as possible, which means packing it in (and squishing the juice out) with our feet. Depending on the sogginess of the skins in question, you either struggle knee-deep in the gooey grapeness or you rise all the way to the top of the barrel on raisins. Inside the vat, you scoop as fast as you can at first, and slow down as the alcoholic fumes start getting to your head. After we fill the barrel of the press, we start on the long, slow process of the actual pressing.
The press moves down millimeters at a time, cranked by hand, and the wine slowly runs out.
When we just can't turn the screw anymore, we sit down and wait a few minutes, and then start again. When the press has gone as far down as possible, we take off the barrel and chip away at the hard fruitcake of grape skins.
These get bagged up and taken to a local distillery to make grappa (the pressed skins already smell like grappa when you get too close!).
The rest of the week is the beginning of the olive harvest! It has been a little cold and windy over the last few days, but it should be back up to the sixties this week - perfect tree-climbing weather!
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