Eons ago, wineries typically crushed their grapes about 3-9’ ft (1-3m) above their fermentation vats/barrels. Nowadays, we have electricity and we have pumps. Some folks are sticking to this gravity thing. Does it matter? What happens when the grand unification theory is proven and gravity is lumped in with molecular forces? ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
See the “Burgundian Brunello” thread: Stella’s gravity fed winery produces wines that inspire notes like “I heard mermaids sing…”
Isn’t this a BD/BS thing?
Grab a Sharpie, some duct tape and write “gravity” on your pump. Problem solved.
There are plenty of people who think that the mechanical action of pumps somehow does damage to the chemical structure of wine. Just like there are plenty who think that barrels should be racked only during a full moon. There isn’t any good scientific basis for either, but it doesn’t hurt anything if they want to do it 
Actually there are very concrete scientific reasons why you might favor gravity feed over the use of pumps.
Most of the pumps used in winemaking do not have hermetic seals, and so invite some oxygen pick-up during a wine movement. Additionally, if you’re talking about must transfer, a big concern would be any shearing action that might shred skins or jacks, crack seeds, etc leading to a more aggressive extraction of less desirable characters from stems, skins and seeds.
The use of pumps during crushing/pressing also can yield a higher solids content in white wine juices, which might mean less fruitiness and more gross lees (with higher processing costs, etc).
Pumping does add a little air, and can add more depending on how much care is used.
I don’t much like the way must pumps work and would never run whites through one. Unless I wanted tannic white wine, which I don’t.
OTOH, trying to think through how I would try to set up a winery to do everything with gravity hurts my head. Unless I just put stuff on the forklift and then siphoned. Still a big PIA. Might be a little better, but I doubt it is worth it.
I’m thinking of the objections to using pumps to move wine after it’s pressed, which some people refuse to do.
Unless they are bottling by hand they are using pumps eventually. No?
Quintessa is a gravity feed operation through crush but not sure from there on.
If you’re bottling without filtration it is fairly easy to gravity feed to a mechanized bottling line.
Alan,
As Bruce pointed out, oxygen pickup with pumps is a very real and measured thing. Pumps have improved massively in the last few decades with the arrival of peristaltic pumps and I do use pumps on occasion, but gravity, when it can be used, is always more convenient and always preferable.
And as for a pump always being needed for bottling, absolutely not; You can push wine out of barrel using neutral gas very easily and forklifts allow gravity use pretty easily. Doing away with pumps entirely is hard to achieve and probably not necessary, but restricting their use is not all that hard.
Exactly, and it holds through all the way to bottling.
And Alan said: “Just like there are plenty who think that barrels should be racked only during a full moon.”
I believe the full moon story is a bastardization of the old belief (who knows, maybe still true) that racking on a high pressure day is preferable to a low pressure day.
I’m trying to grasp the oxygen issue here. A pump will initially have some oxygen in it as well as the hoses and pipes en route to the tank for a matter of a couple seconds until it naturally purges. The tank will have been gassed prior to pumping. Are we getting a bit nit picky about that slight contact? It’s not like a pump is continuously adding air to the wine as it flows. It seems to me that something as simple as topping a barrel will impart more oxygen to the wine than pumping.
Am I missing something here?
Jeremy,
I agree gravity is great! One winery I know well here was designed to allow the maximum use of gravity flow during crush, fermentation, and pressing. But they use a bulldog for sure to rack barrels (I am not sure what they do at blending and bottling time). I’ve seen plenty of pumps being used both here and in Burgundy. Was only meaning to say that I think things can be taken too far sometimes. Cheers!
Plenty of wineries using pumps inspire similar poetic praise.
Alan,
A lot of bulldogs rely on compressed gas (air, nitrogen, CO2) rather than a pump, though that is also an option. Yes, things can get taken too far, but I’d rather lie at the end of too much gravity than too much pumping. And as you will have picked up, some people throw out things like “isn’t this a BD/BS thing?” which implies a heavy level of ignorance about winemaking. Gravity is more Newton than Steiner and has demonstrated and predictable effects.
I never thought of using a pump as being included or not included in BD, do they make any recommendations? Did pumps even exist during Steiner’s life?
The exposure to air seems like a reasonable thing to think about in using pumps (though I wonder if it really makes much of a difference relative to whatever exposure you get just running wine through a hose and dumping it various places). Wish I knew what level of dissolved oxygen there is in an equilibrium barrel of wine, and how close it is to being saturated. What I’ve heard people say about pumps is that they fear the mechanical action will disturb the wine chemistry. Is that something you worry about?
If you are using a pump of appropriate type, properly maintained and operated, then oygen pick-up is minimal. If any of these three prerequisites are ignored then you actually will be dosing small but measurable amounts of oygen into the wine during pumping.
Unless you are actively measuring oxygen pick-up with DO meters upstream (of a pump) and down, it is impossible to know if you’re oxygen free. That problem doesn’t exist with gravity feeds, using properly banded hoses and properly attached sanitary fittings.
Is this all being nit picky?.. one person’s nit picky is another’s attention to detail. Some consider it important, others will not.
Domaine Serene claims five levels of gravity-flow throughout the entire winemaking process. Does that include bottling? Kind of sounds like it from their marketing.