Punch down the cap - How to pige wine

Pigeage is more than just a funny word with indecipherable vowel distribution. It's a way of life. For weeks, all of our wines are going through an extended fermentation where the grapes and grape juice are turning into delicious red wine. This is a critical period known as maceration when the wine will draw its best qualities from the skin and the seeds in the tank. The undamaged grapes of harvest time impart their best qualities to the juice which will one day soon be fine wine.

But it's not smooth sailing, my friends. The tanks we hold the grapes in contain 80 to 100 hectoliters (converted to nonmetric: a lot) of grapes. And the pristine purple marbles that fall into the vat are crushed and torn asunder by the chemical forces at work when yeasts ferment the juice. What's more, there's a byproduct to all this fermenting: CO2. The Carbon dioxide rises to the top of the vat like bubbles in soda and they will lift the majority of the skin and seeds to the top, forming a thick hard cap.

Two or three times a day depending on where we are in the fermentation (determined by measuring the density and temperature of the wine in the cuve). This is hard. It's a struggle to push the grapes back down into the juice. Especially the first time. Especially the first hole. That first puncture is rough, but we've gotta' do it!

I've been looking for excuses to push back the daily pigeage ritual to give my tired arms a rest. My finely tuned ability to procrastinate led me to make a video about pigeing. And now, in an effort to avoid the afternoon pige, I'm writing a blog post about pigeing.

Now you can learn the ins and outs. See the tools I use. Learn the theory and strategies that I usually ignore. You too can use this blog post as a way to not do the work you should probably be doing right now.

Behold punch downs:

Wine punch down - Pigeage

oh, music by Phunt Your Friends available for free download at songfight.org

Winemaking killed the radio star

We just moved a ton of wine barrels onto the oxoline shelving. Full barrels are really, really heavy so we actually put empty barrels on the shelves and then pumped the wine from a full barrel in the middle of the room into an empty barrel on the shelf. This is a tedious and lengthy process, but it's kind of cool to see it in action.

With that in mind, I tried to stay interesting in this video. Now, what's going on is pretty simple.

• Put an empty barrel on the shelf.
• Fill it with a barrel from the ground.
  
• Clean the barrel from the ground.
  
• Put the newly empty barrel on the shelf.
  
• Repeat for like three days of your life.
  

Because it's so simple, I decided to make it an artsy fart music video. I put it to the tune of "A Tear" by Phunt Your Friends which is a collaborative effort between Drew McCarty and I. This also has lyrical contributions from Kate Keelen. The song was originally submitted to SongFight in April 2006.