Diary from the Pyrenees August 2010 - Day 6

Day 6 (23 August 2010):


I returned to Taltarni this morning. I got a lift in the car with Loïc, the COO and Chief Winemaker, and his wife Simone. It’s about a 2.5 hour drive. We started at 7:45 am from my hotel and we reached the winery at about 10:30 am. We had a good chat on the way. I found out that Loïc studied oenology in Bordeaux, then came to Australia to do a harvest and then fell in love with the place (and Simone) and has been at Taltarni for 8.5 years! I told him my observation of the sense of ownership and pride amongst the employees at Taltarni – think he approved of my observation!

After a late start, I poked my nose into the winery to see if I could find something to keep me occupied. Deb and Jaye had started a pad filtration operation for a tank of sauvignon blanc. The pads are designed to absorb the dirty stuff from the bottom of the wine, which had been fined with bentonite. We stopped the process just before the wine turned rather “earthy” and “pasty”. The filtered wine was transferred to another tank and we could see lovely clear wine going in at a high speed. When the pads could absorb no more, we just let the clayey wine run into a tub…..it was rather mucky and disgusting! At another part of the winery, another tank of sauvignon blanc was being “warmed up” via a heat exchange so that the wine could be around 20°C at the time of bottling, which would be in a couple of days’ time. The wine was around 3°C when I first checked it, having gone up quite a bit from its below zero temperature after the cold stabilization process. By the time we finished work, it had only gotten up to 12°C (having had about 6 hours of warming up!). Deb said they would have to repeat the process again in the morning before moving on to do the same with another tank.

Deb and I also did some gassing of the tanks, i.e. adding dry ice (CO2) to the tanks to keep the oxygen from getting in. This is a routine task and has to be done 3 times a week for all the tanks filled with wine. Deb would have to tick this off when done, just like we had to sign off on the worksheets to show that they had been completed.

Jaye drove the forklift into some mud and got stuck. So Robert had to go and get another forklift to pull it out. You should see the speed at which these guys drive the forklift….I wish I were that agile with a normal automobile!

Later in the afternoon, we prepared a filtration set up (pad plus membrane) for the liqueur d’expédition before it would be added to 2006 Clover Hill Vintage Brut. The preparation took about an hour. Therefore, better that we did it the day before.

Lesson #6: Not sure what I took away from today….but I certainly felt that the winery is a very special community where everyone is made to feel integral and important, that “he” or “she” matters, that there is genuine teamwork. So admirable!