WALLA WALLA — When considering the process of winemaking, some minds might recall Episode 23 of “I Love Lucy,” titled “Lucy’s Italian Movie.” While the iconic scene, featuring Lucille Ball and Teresa Tirelli D’Amico, initially involves grape stomping, it culminates into a chaotic wrestling match inside a vat filled with juice, stems and pulp.
In the contemporary landscape of winemaking, grape stomping has become a relic of the past, particularly at Walla Walla’s Pepper Bridge Winery. Just as wine gets better with time, the industry is constantly finding new and more efficient ways to process wine grapes into the fermented drink that so many covet.
Standing out on the crush pad at Pepper Bridge Winery is a massive machine made of metal, cogs and conveyor belts. It is here that Syrah grapes, fresh from the vines, are processed before becoming this year’s vintage.
The journey from the top of the machine to the bottom ends at an optical sorter, created by Key Technology that uses cameras to select grapes based on what settings are input into the program. Everything from size, shape and hue can be selected. As grapes cascade into a large plastic bin, those that do not make the cut are removed with pressurized air. It takes only a split second for imperfect grapes, missed stems or green leaves to be blown away.
From there, the estate’s top-quality grapes continue their path to fermentation.
Wine flavors
Pellet said this year’s harvest had started a week earlier than average start times because of warmer days throughout the past months. As the summer sun beams down on the Valley, wine grapes ripen more quickly through the process of veraison, where the grapes change color.
Pellet, who spends a lot of time out in the vineyards looking at the clusters before harvest and plucking grapes off the vines, has developed a palete over the years so he can tell exactly when harvest needs to start.
“We look at a lot of factors when we are deciding it’s time to harvest,” he said. “In our case, the most important factor is flavors.”
Sugar content, bitterness and acidity are all distinct flavors that Pellet is looking for while taste testing the grapes. He said it is a delicate balance between those flavors to get a distinct and complex flavor profile that will translate itself into the wine.
While the age-old process of hand picking and sorting delicate clusters of wine grapes has changed very little in the thousands of years that wine has been made, the process to actually get to the finished bottle of wine has changed a lot, and varies depending on a winemaker’s style, the variety they are working with and what the intended flavor profile will be. Many Valley vineyards have moved on to use ultramodern processing and production facilities. In the case of Pepper Bridge, this has led to the formation of the state’s first gravity-flow facility, complete with subterranean caves.
In a gravity-flow winery, the grape pulp and juice are moved from the sorting table to the tanks and then to the barrels using gravity rather than pumps. The gentle movement of gravity prevents seed shearing, which introduces bitter tannins, a flavor not so wanted in wine.
Lifecycle of a wine grape
From start to finish, winemaking is a slow process. It can take three full years to go from the first planting of a brand-new grapevine to the first harvest.
The lifecycle of a wine grape starts with the first planting, which is into the soil.
The Walla Walla Valley has four distinct soil terroirs: wind-deposited silt overlying Missoula flood sediments; thick wind-deposited silt overlying basalt bedrock; basalt cobblestone gravels; and very thin wind deposited silt on basalt bedrock, according to the Walla Walla Wine Alliance website.
After the first planting, the vines enter dormancy in the winter, which have no foliage at all. When wine grapes emerge from dormancy, the first buds appear, which is called bud break.
From there the vines go through bloom. Grapes are a perfect flower — which means they don’t require help to pollinate. Fruit set begins and small green clusters of grapes on vines can be seen in vineyards. The magical moment is when the hard green grapes transform into plump fruit — red varieties turn color from green to red — is called veraison.
At last, it is time to harvest.
At harvest, winemakers decide to destem or not for red wine fermentation. They decide to crush the grapes or not before putting the grapes into the tanks.
Then fermentation happens as yeast converts sugar to alcohol. Winemakers decide when to press the grapes, then barrel the wine down for some aging, racking, and then eventually bottling.
The final step before the wine is barreled down is to press the skins for any remaining juice. Gravity is used to fill 100% French oak barrels that are then placed in wine caves, which are carefully monitored as the aging process begins.
Pepper Bridge Winery, winner of many acclaims and awards, started in the Walla Walla Valley with three families — the McKibbens, the Murphys and the Pellets — who have come together to create Bordeaux-style wines all while sourcing 100% of the grapes from the Pepper Bridge estate. Pellet said Norm McKibben has led the way in innovative wine practices, vineyard maintenance and sustainability since he planted his first vineyard in the Walla Walla Valley in 1989.
“Norm was instrumental in establishing the wine industry in Walla Walla,” Pellet said. “He was definitely the one who founded the vineyards for Pepper Bridge.”
Pepper Bridge Vineyard is one of three of the winery’s estate vineyards that started at 10 acres in 1991. Since that time, the vineyard has expanded to cover almost 200 acres and grows varieties such as Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Sangiovese and Syrah.
“We don’t irrigate just to irrigate,” Pellet said. “Water is a very rare resource right now, and we make sure to use techniques to make the most of the water we do use.”
Pepper Bridge also employs sustainable farming through safe pesticides, planting native plants to increase beneficial insects in the area, not using herbicides under the vines, and using supplemental irrigation responsibly. Owl boxes are placed throughout the estate vineyards to encourage helpful predators to diminish the population of harmful pests such as gophers or voles. The winery also has a set of solar panels that supports the winemaking facility.
