Joe,
Assuming a serious question, I know of no requirement for such nor do I know anyone who does rinsing absent some very unusual circumstance such as ant infestation or someone who sprayed sulphur too late in the season.
Best, Jim
More likely snark than serious q.
Alcohol is an efficient disinfectant. Though it won’t take care of crows, snakes, mice, ant colonies or heaps of beetles. 
Wineries use more than enough water as is. Particularly certain neat freaks with a fetish for caustic soda.
Interesting, I would have assume some minimal form of cleaning. I guess this is like the (in)famous Otto von Bismark quote about watching law and sausages being made - you may no longer have the palate for either.
I don’t think at 12%-15%. This came up in another thread. It doesn’t kill aceto or brett bacteria, for instance.
Back in the 90s, on a visit to Ravenswood, I saw a bunch of big plastic tubs of freshly harvested grapes out in the sun that were beginning to ferment spontaneously. There were swarms of bees all over them, attracted by the sugar. But many of the bees were being killed by the blanket of CO2 on the surface and were lying there dead on the grapes/must.
John, I didn’t mean it in that sense, of course it won’t kill off all kinds of bacteria. It was more of a snide remark to neat freaks (any?) worried about grapes not being rinsed.
I was being honest in my question. I don’t know a lot about production of wine.
I figured they had to rinse off all the ick and critters.
I’m kinda with you.
If I was a winemaker, my wines would be the purest, most clean wines in the world. I would be washing each grape individually. Of course, my wine might taste like crap and cost $1M/bottle! ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
Oh come on. It can’t be that expensive to do a quick rinse.
Seriously. The critter factor is grossing me out. You might as well be stomping on the grapes with your nasty fungus infested feet.
Yuck.
That happens too. And punching down by hand in small fermentation vessels by winemakers with very hairy arms and torsos. Traces of dirt and bird pee on the grapes, lots of little critters, vineyard workers handling grapes with bare hands, at times small amounts of rot in bunches. Tasting, a lot of tasting, sharing of glasses and putting remains back into tanks or barrels.
Joe, you really should visit a winery during harvest/crunch. Or maybe not…
You ever eat a hot dog? ;-D
As pointed out in an earlier post, rinsing the grapes would be both impractical and generally counter-productive (you’d be adding unwanted water to the must). I’ve never seen it done at any winery, large or small. I’d think that it would only be done only in exceptional circumstances such as Jim mentioned.
And stomping grapes is done at many small wineries where whole-cluster fermentations are done. Sometimes with boots on but often in bare feet. I’ve done it a number of times in my bare feet. Wineries do take steps to sanitize boots / feet before stomping though.
Lots of bugs go through the destemmer, even when fruit is sorted before it goes in - you can’t get them all off. I’ve rescued various critters from going through - dragonflies, mantises, a lizard or two, a small frog, probably a few other things that don’t come to mind right away. But earwigs, spiders, small beetles, etc. get in there. And I’ve seen a number of wineries, large and small, where macrobins with fruit from the vineyard are dumped straight into the hopper to the destemmer with no sorting at all. That gets done at some well-known, high-quality wineries.
You might want to consider switching to non-fermented beverages.
Seriously, washing grapes would water down the wine, usually considered a Bad Thing just as heavy rain on the day of harvest would be. The reason this is all ok is because S. cerevisiae is a great cleanup crew. It’s the reason people fermented grape juice in the first place and why wine has been drunk for centuries.
Microbins/small crates too. And I would argue there’s nothing (necessarily) wrong with that.
In the context of high quality wine: In a good year with generally healthy grapes, and if you have competent pickers doing a quick sort in the vineyard, I would argue sorting at tables could be unnecessary, may potentially even be counterproductive, and is often a poor way of prioritizing resources. But it’s more and more the rage.
I had a real problem with yellow jackets this year. Many lost their lives in the crusher and then many more in the press. The wine taste good so far.
Water gets in the wine in small quantities from washing and rinsing tanks and equipment, no big deal. But generally you’d avoid bigger quantities, or make precautions in instances where watering back would be tempting or necessary. Most water sources have issues with additives, particularly chlorine compounds. Some wineries filter their water because of this, others go to other lengths if adding water becomes necessary.
This. Your great great great grandfather drank beer or wine or mead as a boy because the water was not safe to drink.
So we are ok with watering down the wine with bugs, dirt, dust, bird poo and pee, reptiles, rodents, small birds and other stuff but not with actual liquid H2O?
Yup. Get over it already. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}