Brewing technology of Lal winery

The vineyard of Latour Winery grows 654.38+00000 grapes per hectare, and the unit output does not exceed 4500 kilograms per hectare, which means that the gardener of Latour Winery has to take care of about 600,000 grapes. Although some work in the vineyard can be done by machines, most of the work is done by hand, especially the work like pruning and harvesting, which is a heavy and hard work. After the grapes are harvested in June 5438+065438+ 10 every year, the grapes should be pruned in March of the following year. Latour Winery adopts Bordeaux's traditional double pruning method, and leaves three buds on each main branch to control the yield. In June, the fruit should be thinned, and some fruit clusters should be removed to ensure that the rest can have sufficient nutrition and a more concentrated aroma. At this time, each grape can only leave up to 8 fruit clusters. This work is especially important for seedlings.

For those plants that are too old and have lost their vitality, the winery will shovel them and replant them. Wineries usually update the grape plants on the whole land, but individual plants. This undoubtedly increases the difficulty of winery management, because all grapes are planted with certain records, and the date of planting is determined to identify the age. When the grapes are harvested, because the old and new plants are mixed together and need to be picked separately, it is impossible to use the machine. Grape workers have to harvest in several times, first picking the fruits of young vines and then picking the fruits of old vines. Grapes are picked and manually screened, and stored according to different qualities. Grapes with poor quality are simply eliminated.

After the grapes were sent to the brewery, the brewing process began. After all the grapes are removed from the stems, they are crushed and fermented in a temperature-controlled stainless steel fermentor. Different varieties of grapes from different plots and different ages will be fermented separately. The process of alcohol fermentation lasts for about a week, and then the skin soaking process lasts for three weeks in the fermentor to fully extract the substances in the grape skin. After this process, the wine should be transferred to another clean fermenter to separate the wine residue and start the fermentation process of apple lactic acid bacteria. After the fermentation process is completely finished, wine and fermentation broth should be tasted in series. Only the best quality wine is qualified to be authentic wine, and the rest can only be second-class wine and third-class wine.

Authentic wines will be infused into brand-new French oak barrels in June+February, 5438, and then aged in the shortest time of 18 months. Before June of the following year, oak barrels were put in special wine cellar to store new wine, and the barrels were not completely sealed with glass plugs. At this time, the wine is "breathable", some of the wine will be absorbed by oak barrels, and some will volatilize. Therefore, oak barrels are filled twice a week. Every three months, the winery empties the barrels to separate the clarified liquor from the precipitated substances. The whole aging process has to go through at least 6 times of barrel dumping. In June, when the weather turns hot, the oak barrel wine will be transferred to the underground cellar, which is the so-called "second year cellar". At this point, the bucket will be replaced by a wooden plug. The cork will tightly plug the wine barrel because of the expansion of the absorbed liquid, and there is no need to replenish wine regularly. However, it may still be necessary to empty the barrels every three months until the wine is aged and bottled.

The next winter, the wine should be clarified once, and six fresh egg whites should be poured into each barrel to let the suspended impurities in the wine sink to the bottom of the barrel. One month before bottling, you should pour the barrel for the last time and transfer the wine to the wine jar for mixing. Bartenders have to go through a series of strict tasting to determine the quality of each barrel of wine and mix it in an appropriate proportion before deciding the bottling date.

From grape picking, after five weeks of fermentation, 65,438+08 months of aging, two months of bottling and several months of distribution, it took consumers two and a half years to buy the fine wine of Latour winery. However, two and a half years is worth waiting for. With its quality and personality, Latour wine always shows the great enthusiasm of many hard-working wine workers, gardeners and winemakers behind the wine.