Domaine de la Romanée Conti Romanée-Saint-Vivant Give Away

It seems like a decade ago now when the first mad rush for bog roll took place and we launched a Domaine de la Romanée Conti Romanée-Saint-Vivant give away.

Time for a re-cap!

For those with a little French the film below recording a harvest at Domaine de la Romanée Conti is epic. I’ve made a few observations below from a winemaker’s perspective.

Observations

Aubert talks of the differences between the terroirs, and the effect of soil radiating heat onto the low vines.

Shallow picking boxes are used to minimise damage to the harvested bunches in transit to the winery. Others will harvest into large ‘backpacks that are transferred into trailerss that hold 1-2 tonnes. The weight of the grapes will crush those at the bottom.

They run a very slow sorting table with people power to ensure every bunch is assessed.

They use open to wooden cuve to ferment.

The cuve help keep the ferments warm. You’ll see shots with a cross-section of the wood at the top of the vats where you can see just how thick it is.

Bernard Noblet, Chef de Caves (winemaker), notes the vats are cleaned with a flambée of marc prior to use.

Aubert in discussion mentions that the fruit is nice and cold. Cold fruit is important as they don’t want the ferment to start to quickly and race away getting too hot at its peak. A slow, progressive ferment allows gentle extraction of flavours and tannins.

They show partial destemming of the fruit. Leaving some whole bunches.

The destemmer is actually a good one yet relatively basic compared to the latest super gentle ones available on the market.

The fruit is not pumped to the cuve. It is lifted using the gentle bunch elevator and destemmed / transferred directly into the vat.

Aubert talks of the importance of phenological ripeness. Ripe tannins and flavours.

The stalks add a little complexity.

The meal you see in the middle of the film is very typical of a harvest lunch in Burgundy. All of the pickers and staff eat together every day. Many domaines provide board during the harvest.

In the footage of the second pick you see harvest is stopped when rain starts and care is taken to cover picked fruit from any rainfall and dilution.

We see the initial ‘shaker at the beginning of the sorting table, this shakes off any matter other than grapes (MOG) and any shot berries, those berries that didn’t fertilise fully and are tiny hard and not mature.

A scene follows where a small portion of fruit is been levelled in a cuve and foot stomped. This practice provides free juice for wild fermentation to start reasonably quickly and produce carbon dioxide to protect the remaining fruit from oxidation and stop the development of volatile acidity.

The ferment will slow transfer to the rest of the fruit.

They add dry ice to produce dry ice adding further protection to the unfermented fruit.

The grapes start at about 15°C. Aubert comments that he doesn’t want the fermentation to be too quick.

We see a temperature monitoring panel. The warmest ferment is up at 33.1°C. Most Pinot makers don’t like to go much above this temperature. Too low a temperature during ferment can give the wine a primary fruity character to high a temperature it may look cooked and the yeast may get stressed producing volatility and hydrogen sulphide, and may stop working resulting in the fermentation getting stuck before all of the sugar has been consumed leaving the wine sweet and prone to spoilage.

The fermentation is relatively quick with the primary fermentation pretty much complete in 5 days.

There is a scene with a green watering can being used to irrigate the top of the fruit with a sulphur solution, again protecting against oxidation, and development of volatility.

You can see different sized wooden cuves. These are have been tailor-made to suit the vineyard holdings and keep them separate. It is important that they are not too empty or overfull. To empty and the fruit will be spread too thin and the skins and stalks will not easily infuse into the liquids and oxidation risk will be high. Too full and as the ferment progresses the vats will overflow.

We see a photo montage of 4 photos starting bottom left working anti-clockwise. You can see a temperature probe in the first shot and increasing levels of fermentation as we progress through the photos. The last still being very early in the ferment. The foam from fermentation is very pale and the fruit still quite dark / black in colour. The stalks yet to take on any red colour.

Aubert talks of the beautiful foam of the ferment. It’s an indicator of a good fermentation.

We see the fermentation being irrigated by what looks like a stainless steel spider. Behind the man on the plank there is a cylindrical stainless steel strainer with a hose in it. This is being used to allow them to pump the liquid only from the bottom the vat back over the top and through the ‘spider’  splitting the wine into 9 different channels allowing a very gentle irrigation of the fruit at the top of the ferment. One single outlet would be very aggressive more like a firehose than a trickle. The aim here is gentle infusion.

By actually plugning the spider into the ferment this ensures a good even and gentle turnover of the liquids. This is a very early stage of the ferment, it isn’t really active, the process would also evenly spread yeast throughout the cuve.

Some wineries are using sprinkler like arrays in an attempt to be even gentler with the extraction of colour, flavour and tannin. Others use air pulses from the bottom of the vat to gently turn the liquids over the top of the ferment. Ferments end up being full of carbon dioxide like soft drinks and if agitated, just like a can of fizzy drink they’ll erupt.

In the following scene, we see a basic pump over in a marginally more advanced ferment. Again small hoses running with pumps at low speed are used and the end of the hose is placed on top of the fruit rather than the liquids being shot down from high above.

If you pause and look closely you can see grape seeds at the top of the ferment. They are brown in colour. This is something makers look for as it is an indication of tannin ripeness.

There is talk of use of biodynamic practices over the last 25 years.

Then we see another method of cap management in again a slightly more advanced ferment. Pigeage or plunging is being used to submerge the cap at the top of the ferment. This stops the cap drying and spoiling and also aids in the extraction of colour, flavour and tannins.

These different methods of cap management are employed at different stages of the ferment according to the winemaker’s intent.

As the fermentation progresses and the skins break down, plunging becomes easier.

In the following scene, we see what look like around 500L barrels in front of cuves being used to ferment small volumes of fruit. They both have a cooling plate in them. Coolant is passed through the plates to cool the fermentation if it gets too hot. The single steel tube next to the cooling plates is a temperature probe.

Ferment monitoring is taking place, samples of the ferment being taken, poured into a meauring cylinder and density measured using a hydrometer that will indicate the sugar level in the ferment.

Tasting the ferment takes place daily to assess progression, tannin management and any potential problems that may need to be addressed.

10 days later it’s time to press. The vats are emptied using a conveyer directly into an air bad press to avoid pumping the fruit.

During the pressing process, the wine is tasted.

They use a very gentle peristaltic pump to transfer the wine into a tank before transferring it to barrel for malolcatic fermentation.

If you have any thoughts, questions leave them below.