Christine's Corner

I Love Lucy Making Wine

Do you remember the episode of Lucy stomping grapes with her bare feet; initially very hesitant, but then truly gets into the act of breaking the grape skins? Well, the video of that episode was not available, but I found one that was equally humorous. The reason I started thinking about manual grape stomping was, although, most wineries use mechanical crushers to perform the same job in a fraction of the time, there are still wineries who still use people to crush their grapes. Many of the Port houses today still use grape stomping as their primary method of crushing grapes. Apparently the light treading enables the gradual excretion of colour and tannins to meld together, plus the bonus items that your feet have tracked in provide more complexity to the wine…No joke. One of the Port Houses, actually, switched over to an automatic crusher for one vintage and changed back the following year, because it did not live up to the standards they were accustomed. Hope you enjoy the video.

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