The Crusher!

The first stop for all grapes at a winery is…dun ta dun...The Crusher! It doesn’t matter if it’s Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot, first things first! The winery I work at only processes Penfold’s Premium Red Wines and yes that includes Bin 707 and the infamous Grange!

Grapes come to us in two ways, either in a dump truck or bins. The dump truck is the quickest and pretty self-explanatory. The other are in bins, which are placed in different locations around the vineyards to be filled and then stacked on a flatbed truck to transport. At the winery, the bins are removed from the flatbed with a forklift and emptied individually into the crusher. It's a bit more tedious but still relatively easy and it keeps our forklift drivers busy :)

Once the grapes are dumped into the receival bin, a feeder device called a screw way moves the grapes at a controlled pace to the destemmer. The destemmer does exactly what it sounds like, it removes the stems from the grapes, hence the name! The berries drop into a hopper and the stems continue through the back of the machine, up the elevator and are conveyed to a rubbish bin and then used as compost. This whole process gently squeezes the berries and breaks the skins to start to liberate the contents of the berries. The berries and juice from the hopper are then transferred, to one of the three places: the vinimatics, the potters or the static fermenters. So what is the difference between grapes and berries? And a little fun fact I learned, as a whole or bunch they are called grapes and once separated from the stem they are called berries. 

Time to do work!

The Crusher!

MOG - Materials Other than Grapes: 

Includes anything from leaves to canes to trunks to debris. Each load of grapes is graded on a scale from 0-5 based on the amount of MOG it contains. The higher the number, the more MOG it contains and the lesser the quality of the load, which consequently decreases the amount of money the grower receives for each load. Above would be MOG 2

Inside look at the destemmer: 

'Fingers' above the small slots rotate to remove the larger chunks of stems. Grapes are pulled off the stems and fall through the holes. Some small amounts of stem particles do fall through the slots but are usually desired to be kept with the berries for tannin structure.

Bearded Lizard

Sometimes these guys are found in the loads. Each load is monitored closely while being processed for many reasons, this guy being one of them. It was a chilly morning so he was frozen stiff!

But don't worry...we brought him back to life. Feisty lil fella!!!