Stomp Your Grapes

Filed in archive Wine Making on November 22, 2006

Doesn't look particularly appetizing, does it?

I'm having "I Love Lucy" flashbacks right now, but this picture is part of an interesting and humorous look at wine making written by Jenny Barchfield for the Associated Press and in this case published by the West Central Tribune.

If nothing else, you have to love the title of this piece, Labor - Wine with Great Legs.

In it, she talks about her days working in a vineyard in Burgundy, which included all the back-breaking work that goes along with it such as picking and stomping grapes:

DAY TWO: STOMPING

My back aching from picking, I decide to try my feet at stomping, or pigage, as the age-old method is known in French. Despite warnings that I will "not be so much stomping grapes as swimming in them," I have visions of splashing around in knee-high barrels with exploding grapes underfoot.

One look at Louis Latour's 19th-century cuverie, or fermenting room, dispels any such daydreams. For one thing, the vats are enormous: more then 6.5 feet wide and nearly 10 feet deep. Clearly, there will be no playful splashing here.

Also, I won't actually be crushing the grapes: they've already been machine slit and pressed before they hit the vats. My job is to mix up the juice at the bottom of the barrel with the grape seeds and skins that float to the top. It is this densely packed layer of seeds and skins, known as the cap, that will give red wine its color.

Most wineries have mechanized this process, but the tradition-conscious Latour label still prefers the manual method.

Denis Fetzmann, the head of winemaking at Louis Latour, gives me a pair of threadbare shorts, a harness that resembles a medieval torture device and a lecture on stomping safety. Pigage, it turns out, is the most dangerous job in the wine business.

If you don't sink to the bottom of the barrel and drown, you risk suffocation by invisible toxic fumes. Carbonic gas, a byproduct of the fermentation process, accumulates on top of the vats. One sniff will knock you out, and a couple of deep breaths is enough to kill you.

For that reason, stompers always work in pairs. If one partner passes out, the other can fish him or her out using a strap attached to the harness.

Armed with that disturbing knowledge, I cinch my harness. Extra tight.