It was interesting crushing the Cabernet versus the Syrah. Cabernet has a more fragile stem than Syrah, and the clusters therefore tended to break in the crusher-destemmer, with some stems passing through with the fruit. Ed’s job for the day was picking out the stems, to make sure they didn’t affect the wine.

We also got to use our new basket press on Saturday. What an improvement! The press holds nearly a full bin, so we were able to press out two bins in the morning. That would have been an all-day affair last year with the old press. We start by siphoning off most of the wine, using a custom-made filter to keep out the skins. We then load the skins into the press, which gently compacts the fruit to extract the remaining wine. This leaves a solid “cake” of pressed skins, which we compost out in our orchard. Finally, we used the small press for the grape skins that didn’t fit in the main press.