october 2023

I am writing to you on Sunday evening after an inspiring, challenging, and incredibly educational harvest week in Santa Barbara wine country.

Shameless self-promotion: If you don’t follow us on instagram yet, please add us @voonwines. We’ve got behind-the-scenes harvest content there!

Harvest 101

It’s a common saying in the industry that creating wine consists of two months of frantic wine making (that’s harvest) and ten months of wine selling.

This year (2023) the Sta. Rita Hills had an unusually cool year. As a result, it’s taking longer for the grapes to ripen to the appropriate level for wine.

Towards the end of the growing seasons in September and October of each year, winemakers and vineyard managers go into the vineyards to collect samples of grapes (which means that they literally cut grape clusters) from different parts of each block of vines. They proceed to crush the grapes, extract the juice and use tools to measure the Brix (sugar content) and the pH. Once things look right, they will “call a pick.”

Ideally, wine grapes will be harvested (picked) either early in the morning or late at night when the berries have the optimal acidity and water content for wine making (i.e., not in the hot afternoon sun). Because of our small volumes at VOON, we can time our picks perfectly — giant industrial wine operations may not be so flexible…

At VOON we hand-harvest our grapes, which is a very manual process. Teams of workers cut individual berry clusters off of each vine and place them into 1/2 ton containers to be immediately delivered to the winery.

Once the grapes arrive at the winery, they are sorted again to ensure that only berries remain. At VOON, we always hand-sort our berries — our wine is a labor of love!

Once sorted, the next steps depend on the type of wine the winemaker wants to make. White wines are generally pressed (crushed) to juice immediately. This juice will then be racked, or moved to a larger vessel (typically stainless steel) to ferment.

Red wines are often de-stemmed, where the stems are removed so only the berries remained. At VOON, we ferment our Pinot Noir in an open top container, with roughly 70% of the berries de-stemmed and 30% remaining “whole cluster.”

Fermentation will usually happen naturally if allowed. At VOON we use native yeasts, meaning we don’t add anything — there’s enough yeast on the berries and in the air in the winery. Some winemakers always inoculate with commercial yeasts, while others will only if needed.

Fermentation generally takes up to two weeks and is complete when the Brix (sugar) gets down to 0 (technically -2 Brix).

Because we’re such a small brand, at VOON we inspect every wine during fermentation multiple times per day. Inspections consist of measuring the Brix and temperature, but also smelling the wine as well as tasting the juice frequently. When there is no more sugar for yeast to convert to alcohol, fermentation is complete.

At this point, the wine is racked to aging vessels. At VOON, we like to use neutral French oak barrels. Other common vessels include stainless steel barrels, new oak barrels, and even clay amphorae.

After the right amount of aging — which is different for each wine and is a stylistic decision — the wine is ready for bottling!

To keep this newsletter digestible — and hopefully interesting — we simplified the winemaking process a bit here. If there’s any part that you are still curious about, please let us know!