This past week was a random mix of actives. We went from hand harvesting to going through the research winery to tasting chinese wines to eating oysters.
They call it the immersion module, so there are trying to immerse us into the French culture. Immersion point number one, NEVER BE ON TIME. Oh my goodness, the French are always late. Our group has been very punctual to all occasions and the French…well they are consistently 30 minutes or more behind schedule. It is a terrible influence on the students (me) because I feel no need to be on time, ever. I almost want to go to Germany my second year just so I can be punctual.
I am not sure what other immersion points are, but that is the only one that really stuck.
Now for some technical things that I learned and might bore a lot of you, and fascinate the others.
Mechanical Harvesters: In previous blog.
Flash Detente: This literally explodes grapes. After the grapes are harvested and destemmed/crushed, they are put through a flash detente (if you want to or have one). This process is very rare right now and still in research phases. So this flash detente first heats up the grapes to your desired temp, normally around 80 C. The juice continues through the machine without any affect while the berry skins are put into a vacuum and instantly burst. The color and aroma from this flash is returned back to the juice and put into a tank to ferment. Now the details on this are a little vague and when they were telling us about it, it was really loud so I couldn't understand it all. Hopefully I will learn more later and then inform you better, a lot better. I did learn later that the color in the wines which are used in this process is very deep and rich since the skins color is exploded and in the juice, BUT the color is not stable with time and can start to precipitate out of the wine to the bottom of the bottle (eeewww). So that is one thing that they are researching and maybe in the future people won't care about fading wines? And when I say fading I mean a Syrah turning into a Pinot or Rose color.
Pressing: There are so many different ways to press juice/wine from grapes/skins. There is the classic basket press and bladder press. This research winery also had a centrifuge press. Its advantages was its ability to continually press and be fed more grapes unlike a bladder press where you press one batch and then have to unload and load it again. BUT a big disadvantage is that you can't make any press cuts. In regular pressing you will first have the free run juice which is seen as the highest quality juice. As you press the winemakers will make cuts based on taste. The more pressure (in bars) you put onto the grapes, the more tannin that can be extracted from the skins, meaning the wine/juice gets a rougher mouthfeel. Winemakers will take note of this change and potentially ferment or age these different batches separately. In the end, I don't know if that centrifuge press is worth it unless you are a big winery that is more worried about volume than quality.
Cement tanks: (Yes, the exist) They were popular back in the day but kind of fell off the radar for a while. There have recently been making a comeback. Why cement you ask? Well they are very good at regulating temperature. In the summer the wine stored in the tanks will not get too hot and then in the winter the wine will not get too cold because the cement is so thick and a good insulator. This means that the winery does not have to worry about cooling systems. They do have cooling plates for fermentation to make sure the soon to be wine does not get too hot from the yeast eating up all the sugars, but that is the only temperature change they plan on doing. Some down sides to cement is that the tanks are not movable most of the time. Where there are put or made is where they stay. So if your winery were to get bigger or remodel the tanks would potentially negatively affect the plans. 
Winemaking: Get grapes, put them in a bin, get wine in a few months (or days).
Psych!
Winemaking is so complex and situational that explaining it in one blog would be tedious, long, semi complicated, and potentially dry. So hopefully throughout all of the blogs you can pick up on some things and I can touch on basics every now and then.
Now onto my (minimal) free time at Pech Rouge. I went on a sunrise run on the beach which was so beautiful and worth it. I have never done a run at sunrise, or ran on a beach for an extended period of time, but I really liked it. They only thing that was not ideal was the damn wind, but that wind never stopped the whole week we were there.
We also had some crazy French ladies do some funky interpretive dance about wine for us. They seriously looked like they were drunk/cracked out/crazy, but they were just being dramatic, and did a really good job.
There was a ton of wine tasting. As you know there was the Chinese wine tasting. We also tasted some of the wine made at Pech Rouge. The had us try three dealcolized wines. They dealcolized it to 10%. All in all, I thought the wines lacked a good mouthfeel. The rose we had had a nonexistent finish. I have never had a wine with no finish, maybe a very short finish, but there was nothing. NOTHING. It kind of showed me that the alcohol in wine does add to its flavor, character, and its overall enjoyment. We also tasted some wine from the SupAgro school in Bordeaux. I really liked this wine. They had one which was more traditional and oaky, but then there was another one that had a good amount of fruit in it. I really liked both too though they were way different styles. The last tasting that is noteworthy (because there were more) was of some Carignanes. A nice French lady had some home made red blends that were mainly Carignane. I am a sucker for Ridge's Buchinani Carignane so I had high hopes for this one, despite more people discounting the variety. Luckily, I loved it. I think I may just be a sucker for that variety but the wine was good. Granted the lady had to be a decent winemaker to make a nice, interesting, clean wine, but damn I like Carignane.
There was a hike one day which was semi random but cool and had a good view. The last event which was also very random but cool was out sea food feast of a lunch. I know it sounds stuck up or annoying when I say I don't really like seafood so this meal was not too special for me. Even though I don't care for this "glorious" food group, I gave everything a try: the oysters, clams, snails and shrimp. To be honest I only liked the shrimp. I only liked the other things when I covered it in a garlic aioli which means I liked that aioli.
Immersion point number two (just remembered), eat MASSIVE lunches and always have wine with meals. Don't worry, they don't eat breakfast so no wine that early. But seriously, the lunches we were fed this week were absurdly massive. I don't know how French people aren't rolling around their country in obesity. After every lunch I would seriously need a nap or a half marathon jog. One or the other, not continue working.
That was my week at Pech Rouge. Now back to Montpellier where I need to continue to settle in.
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