Winemaking Continued 2


	Now that we've lined-up all of the above, let's start: Select-quality whole fresh fruits are brought to us here on Spring Mountain or to our Distillery in Mendocino County.

Here on the Mountain the fruits are destemmed or de-pitted and crushed directly into 1 Ton /240 gallon open-top fermenters, right here at the crushing and fermenting pad. Special yeasts used for different products are added to fermenters to start fermentation. Each fermenter, during the course of alcoholic fermentation (6-12 days) is hand punched-down and/or pumped-over 2-4 times a day to extract flavors and color and cool the fermenting must.

After the alcoholic fermentation of red wine is finished, (all sugar converted to alcohol), the fermenters are sealed from air for the next 3-5 weeks during which time a malolactic fermentation and softening of young tough tannins extracted during alcoholic fermentation will complete. Free-run red wine is pumped out of the fermenter and the pomace is hand-pressed into an old basket press! Free-run and pressed wines are combined and barreled into 60 gallon French oak barrels for +/- 2 years of aging. After barrel aging, the wines are finished, bottled and bottle-aged for months or years before being released to our customers. As I said, a simple thing!

General Distillation Equipment
The technology of simple fractional, alcohol distillation uses basically three pieces of equipment: Still, Rectifying System and Condenser.

Fundamentally, there are three different kinds of alcohol stills, with various rectifying and condensing systems and numerous distillation techniques:

1. Batch Still: All copper, direct fire, classic Alambic Pot-Still with head & swan's neck and coil Condenser.
2. Continuous (industrial) Still: Steel / Glass column stills, steam heated, rectifiers & condensers.
3. Various Hybrid Stills of the first two sysems: Each system is used to distill various spirits of varied quality. Economy and quality of spirits production are the main reasons for choice.