Spills and Splashes - Le Garage Newsletter 12.2.22
More than a decade ago I joined a wine club. The person who invited me made one barrel of wine a year and it was his wine I helped make for the first few years of my amateur winemaking days. It was so much fun! There was a process in place that made it easy to learn and there was tradition that added warmth and fun to the work days.
We crushed grapes in a garage, we punched down the skins during fermentation, and pressed the juice out of the skins and into drums on press day. Then with pumps and pickup trucks we moved the wine to each member of the wine clubs basements, pumping it right into their barrels.
Over the years the volume of wine we made increased. One year, we had so much wine that we did not have enough containers for transport. We were searching for a solution. The reaction of all those passionate winemakers was priceless when I said, “Just pump it into the woods.” I’ll never forget the laughs that followed nor that ludicrous statement.
Today, I have plenty of tubs, drums, barrels, carboys, and jars but there are still going to be wine splashes, spillage, and overflowed barrels. I have certainly mistakenly wasted my share of good wine. My goal is to keep spillage at a minimum in the future and to never pump good wine into the woods!
