Punch Down Town

Do you want a mini lesson in winemaking? I am no professional at it, but I do know something…

When making red wine you have the fermentation of the juice with the skins.  Sometimes you can ferment with whole clusters (whole berries and stems), whole berries (destemmed) or destemmed and crushed.  The wineries I have worked at, J. Lohr, Ridge and St. Hallett, mainly destemmed and crushed their red grapes.  

At St. Hallett, some of the loads are a small tonnage, so putting them into a big tank is a waste of tank space.  With the condensed vintage we are having, tank space is valuable so these smaller loads are put into smaller containers: bins or portable tanks (smaller).  These fermentation vessels require more hands on care, versus the automated pump overs on the big red fermentors.  This is where the lab comes in and makes a manual job a little more fun…by naming the bin area "PunchDown Town".  On red fermenations, you want to extract color and tannin from the skins and to get this you need to emerse the skins in the juice.  But the years are actively fermenting, off gassing CO2, pushing the skins back up.  So for extraction purposes, punch downs help to extract from the skins.  Punch downs also help to mediate the temperature.  You don't want the ferments to get too hot unless the yeast will die. There are probably other bad side affects but I can not remember them from school at this point.  

Well that is your lesson in red wine making, and very brief and maybe not 100% accurate, but that is my take on it so far :)