Busy vat room in Beaune (Burgundy)

Filling an open-top fermenter Beaune, Burgundy
If the picking in the vineyard is exciting, the vat-room side of the harvest offers the first glimpses on the future wines : after a few days, there's an atmosphere in the chai which is palpable, with all these yeasts gathering steam and communicating with each other. It's not usually the best time to drop in a winery unanounced, everyone is pretty busy and nervous, there's no time for dilettante chatting on the magic of wines. Thanks to Philippe Pacalet and Monica I could have a feel of the thrill. When I see the vat room crowded with vats, open fermenters, pumps and other tools, I wonder how Philippe was coping a few years ago before he found this facility in downtown Beaune. In the early years of his winery, he not only didn't own vineyards (he still doesn't) but he didn't even have a place of his and relied on subletting cellars and chais here and there (3 or 4 at a time if I remember), which means he had to commute with the wine. Since he took root in this former négoce house, he's less a gipsy in the aristocratic world of Burgundy family wineries, and he gained a better work environment.
As lead picture for this story, I could have chosen one of these side pictures right away : If there's a shared obsession in many wineries at this time of the winemaking process, it's hygiene. You keep washing things all the time then, and particularly your feet (like Philippe Pacalet does on the right) when you're just back from checking the harvest. On the picture on left, Hortense is hosing buckets and a vacuum cleaner. Hygiene is lesson #1 in non-interventionist winemaking, because unlike conventional wines where sulfur is repeated hammered on the incoming grapes, the juice and the nascent wine, here the juices/wine is more or less left by itself, and with a strict hygiene you reduce the chance that something gets wrong.
Note that there are only two remaining facilities in downtown Beaune, Pacalet's and the one of Fanny Sabre, all the other having migrated on the outskirts or in the villages of the Côte.

Pumping over Philippe Pacalet manages to spend time on the harvest sites and to overlook the early vinification stage altogether. His facility is comparatively much more quiet than the vineyard but you still feel a buzzing activity by the few remaining actors there, mostly Mickaël and Hortense, and at times Romain and Philippe. On this picture, Philippe is looking at the lab results which tell about the juice condition. When the grapes arrive in the crates, Hortense takes a sample cluster and gets the data, it's more accurate than analyze the juice dropping from the bottom of the fermenter. Here the potential is 13 °, a good maturity. Last year they had 12°/12,5°, which was turned into good wine too, by the way. Mickaël, atop a fermenter, is handling a pumping over with a new machine recently purchased by Philippe and which can change the temperature of a juice/wine. Here the juice is slightly warmed up all the while being pumped over the top. This machine is used only when needed, and I showed up the day it was used.

I spotted a small oval foudre in the buffer room between the chai and the whites cask room, it seemed to have landed here recently and it is obviously the new toy of Philippe. It was lended to him by Marc Grenier (the cooper based east of Beaune) and he plans to make tries with it, to see how it behaves on the wine. The foudre has a volume of 10 hectoliters and it offers many features with a large opening at the top and separate stainless-steel taps for the wine and the lees (the latter being at the bottom level while the former a bit above the supposed lees). Philippe has filled the small foudre with water (sulfured water) and tastes it from time to time to check the wood imprint evolution. I understand that he already changed the water and there's now less oaky taste. The first time, he says, the tannins were obvious when you tasted the water, but now they're gone. He will put some Chablis inside to see what it yields with the wine. This oval foudre is a gem of a vat, and I understand he's excited at the prospect of using it. With the equivalent volume of roughly 2 demi-muids, it should be soft on wood for the wines, especially after a couple of years. Monica arrives as we're around the foudre and she says with a laugh that while he usually never speaks about his vats, he now can't stop asking people if they've seen his new foudre...
On the picture on right if I remember correctly, Hortense was doing some débourgage work, pumping gross lees away from a vat. Monica unveiling the Ruchottes-Chambertin As we're in the last days of the harvest, most of the fermenters are full and quietly waiting for the full swing of the fermentation. Most, if not all, of these tronconic wooden vats have been made or renovated by Marc Grenier, the cooper who has breathed a second life into the traditional open-top fermenters by skillfully renovating dozens of them and creating new ones with improved features. There are all kinds of volumes in the chai, so Philippe choose the fermenter each time depending of the volume of grapes for a given climat. The plastic covers mean it's full underneath and CO2 is kept trapped on the top. This particular fermenter which Monica is gently unveiling was offered by Marc Grenier to Philippe, it now holds the smallest cuvée of the négoce, the Ruchottes Chambertin, only enough rows to fill this small 100-year-old vat. Monica withdraws a cluster, still intact although it's probably in the early stage of carbonic maceration.
Monica shows me around, including in the surface cask-room opposite from the chai, where the Chardonnay is fermenting. She listens here and there as Hortense pointed us to a couple of casks where the wild yeasts have begun their work, there's indeed the familiar fermentation song here... Later, if I remember, these casks will be stored in the underground cask cellars but the yeast/ambiance and room temperature here on the surface are more fit for this early stage of the fermentation. There's a large open room separating the vat room for the reds from this white cask-room so that there isn't any interference between the two wild yeast atmospheres. The whites are coming At some point, Philippe comes back from the picking site, along with a truck full of crates. This is the Chassagne-Montrachet, there was lots of sorting on this terroir, the pickers having to select and drop the damaged grapes first before putting the clusters in the bucket. Philippe hasn't any truck of his own for the harvest transfer between the vineyard and the chai, he rents a few of them during these harvest days, which makes sense.
These grapes will be pressed in a few minutes but first, he or Mickaël must note the weight of the load, so that all this data can be later provided to the French Customs, the authority in charge of everything alcohol in France. By being told the weight of each batch, the administration will know approximatively the volume of the cuvées, I guess. They position the crate load on the winery scale a,d Hortense will note the data, the gross weight and the final weight minus the tare weight. I din't pay attention here for the whites but later on the reds I noticed that the loads were always making more or less 380/385 kg, crates included (15 of them) which Hortense said was making 340 kg of net weight for the grapes. This means that Marine the other day was running up the slope with a 25-kg load....
There's no sorting table here, all the sorting has been don cluster per cluster between the rows, and when I was walking along the rows I often came across a picker who was foraging through sometimes very small cluster with their shears to put down the undesired grapes. The press was already clean when the white load arrived and Philippe had just to put everything in the proper position. Mickaël & Hortense loading the press After having weighed the crates, Mickaël and Hortense fill the horizontal press with the Chassagne Montrachet. The volume for this terroir is much smaller in 2012, with an equivalent of 2 casks (pièces) compared to 6 on a "normal" vintage [insofar as one can speak of a normal vintage in the first place, every vintage being different one way or another]. This climat got some hailstorm, that's why.
The pressing will take a few hours, it's not a pneumatical press, just an old-style horizontal one, which Philippe or another chai worker alternatively switches on and off. From what I understand they press gently at a one-kilogram pressure, then they switch it off, backtrack a bit, leaving the juice drop by itself and then after a few minutes they switch it on again. They do that repeatedly along a few hours, and it seemed to me from what I witnessed that the press spent more time on the "off" position than on the "on", but the juice was somehow flowing more generously when on "off", hard to understand for a non-initiate like me... Philippe says that the pressing will last 8 to 9 hours. After all these crates have been emptied into the press, there's more hosing and cleaning so that oxidized juice doesn't spoil the atmosphere, and Hortense gets busy again. Hortense came from Paris to help Philippe during these harvest days, otherwise she works in a wine shop near Chatelet, named Crus. She followed an enology training in Montpellier if I remember and she still doesn't know if this wine-shop is temporary, if she'll come back to the winemaking front. You can see her on this Crus blog post about a recent tasting of Bordeaux wines at the wine shop. Here is the Crus blog.
Mickaël is a permanent staff at Pacalet. Philippe tasting the Gevrey Now that's the time for the Gevrey-Chambertin to reach the facility. Patrice (who drove the truck) and Romain (who like Mickaël is a permanent staff here) unload the crates on the fenwick and put the loads on the platform. Philippe and Monica watch the scene, Philippe tasting the grapes all the while. Here again, sample clusters are taken out for further analysis and data collection. The crates will be samely weighed and then unloded into a fermenter in the large vat room.
The company on the other side of the street is Taransaud, the cooperage, at least it's one of their facility. This is a saturday and the whole street is quiet but on week days this side street of Beaune can be busy on harvest days. The good thing is that the Pacalet facility has this deep access on the street where they can move freely without bothering about the traffic.
There will be again for a change much hosing to do with all these crates and this cleaning thing, along with Marine's performance at carrying crates in the vineyard, reminds me of the delightful Xtranormal movie "Sommelier starts a winery") when this character (a sommelier planning to leave his New-York job to become a winemaker in Walla Walla) says that making wine is 49 % cleaning shit, 49 % moving heavy shit around and 2 % drinking beer (watch it again, it's lots of fun)... Filling the fermenter Romain, who also spent time picking with the group, came back to the winery with the Gevrey and he is now emptying the Gevrey into a large open-top wooden fermenter. Here there were a couple of crates with some white grapes along the Pinot Noir. I'm not sure it's Chardonnay, I think I remember someone saying it was Pinot Blanc. It's from an isolated vine from a white variety sitting there in a sea of Pinot Noir for some unknown reason, maybe just an error when the grafted plants were gathered at the nursery. I love the idea anyway, on this touch of something else landing in the Pinot Noir, and there could be several more white vines, that'd be fine for me.
Thanks to the forklift (pictured on right), filling the fermenter is made more easy, even if each batch of 15 crates makes about 380 kg to handle (and you need several of them here). I understand why they chose Romain for the job (but I'm sure Marine would have done it easily though).
It's all whole clusters here and as the grapes are in good shape, the only bleeding should come from the bottom layers lightly crushing under the weight of the load. Mickaël uses the plastic fork to sometimes distribute the grapes evenly in the fermenter. Injecting CO2 From time to time, Romain injects some CO2 into the grapes to keep the maceration fully carbonic and protect the grape load from an early oxidation. The injected CO2 plus the CO2 resulting from the fermentation start will together provide the protection needed at this stage. Most of the grapes are going to stay whole and will go through a carbonic maceration, then at the chosen time there will be some pigeage with the feet and some pumping over if necessary. Mickael holding a lighter As the fermenter is nearly full and has been through several CO2 injections, Mickaël checks the CO2 level above the fermenter, nearing a lighter progressively to see if the CO2 saturation is good. At this stage it's not wine to put your head close to the top of the vat, as CO2 can strike without warning. Not only they're two to work near the vats at this stage, but Philipe's vatroom is equipped with a sliding winch that can lift a worker in case he faints over a fermenter. But the old-school lighter or candle method is probably the best tool to visualize the danger. Bringing back the pallet Message to the MSA and other work-place regulation enforcers : this picture is a fake, a photomontage of some sort, these kids have never set a foot in the vatroom of course (my lawyer told me this trick). These kids don't need to focus on what's going on around them here, it's like Mozart, Bach and Sibelius, the most important is that they vaguely bath in the atmosphere and it will come back to them one day...
The plastic pallets are very convenient when you think about it. I guess they're now found in most wineries, they have the advantage of being easy to wash, of being light and of not harboring potential nefacious germs that could disrupt the fermentation process. Empty fermenter waiting its grape load The harvest was not yet finished when I visited the winery some 10 days ago, and this open-top wooden fermenter still waited for its load of__I think__ generic-Burgundy Pinot Noir (which was due to be picked the next day or so). Look how beautiful this vat looks now, it was probably watered recently to be water proof again after 10 months of rest (before which it had been washed with Pacalet wine like you could see last year at mid-scroll on this story). Already in place in the bottom, you can see the wooden cage through which the juice will flow to the tap, keeping back the skins and other solid parts so that they don't clog the pipe. Romain working on Lavaux-Saint-Jacques This was the right time for a pigeage on the Gevrey-Chambertin Lavaux Saint-Jacques 1er Cru and Romain climbed atop the small open-top fermenter, after the ritual shower on the lower body. These grapes were harvested almost a week earlier or 6 days ago, from a small parcel which is 50 years old. Romain says that for the first pigeage, the cap is pretty firm and tight, and some effort was needed to punch it down, plus the temperature is not very warm then. This vat was originally full at the beginning, really almost reaching the top, but after the pigeage started the surface level dived a bit as there was now no space between the clusters and grape flesh. Along the following pigeages, the whole thing is also softer and warmer with the fermentation taking off after more juice is being released through the crushed grapes. Experiencing that direct feel of the wine in-the-making with the body and legs is not common, and it is said to have plenty of miraculous virtues...
After this old ritual that no machine may replace as efficiently, Romain walks down the ladder and will take another shower (picture on right).
I peered under the plastic sheet covering the fermenter next to the small vat where Romain did his pigeage, and the grapes there (pic on left) were fully intact, they hadn't been touched by any cap punching or pigeage and were in the midst of their carbonic maceration. I asked where they were from but I didn't take note immediately and I forgot the name of the parcel. However, you can see here by clicking on the picture how intact these clustered grapes are, which makes a big difference to conduct this type of vinification. Peristaltic pump at work This took place in the white-wines cask room, where their fermentation takes place; don't ask me what Mickaël is doing here, I didn't take note and forgot. Probably some sort of racking, they use this Italian-made peristaltic pump that Philippe purchased this summer, it makes a very smooth job on the wines, no vibrations at all. Helping ship a full cask Shades of colors in the chai Philippe poured me a few good wines during that visit in the chai, first a Saint Aubin 1er Cru Murgers des Dents de Chien 2011, a beautiful white which was bottled 3 weeks ago. There had been three casks made of this white in 2011 but in 2012 with the falling volumes on this vintage there will be only one cask.
We had also a red : Beaune 1er Cru les Perrières 2010, not a good year, Philippe jokes. How many times did we hear this "good year", "bad year" thing when speaking to people with some interest in wines. The worse is around the Foire aux Vins (the mass wine sales in the French supermarkets), when the supermarkets try to make gullible customers believe they're in for a bargain. Speaking of the best years, we'll try to follow Art Buchwald's advice which he made long ago : "Always carry a vintage chart with you. If you're not sure of the best wine years, take the wine card to the washroom [of the restaurant] and check it against your vintage chart".
Finally, thanks to Monica and the kids, I tasted the freshly-pressed juice of the Chassagne-Montrachet (jus de raisin in French), also a delicious treat and a luxury indeed. The video will fit in the serie "teach real wine to your children".

Comments

[Sue Dyson]

Fascinating story as always. Thank you so much for taking the time to share in such detail all the things you learn. You might be interested to know that soon only Philippe Pacalet will be in Beaune. Fanny Sabre is selling and moving to larger premises in Pommard. When we talked to her recently she was hoping a young winemaker just starting out who doesn't need a huge space might buy her place. Hopefully it will stay as a winemaking and cellaring facility. Cheers, Sue

[Bertrand]

Thanks, Sue,

Yes, I actually heard about Fanny Sabre's town-house facility being on sale while I was at Pacalet, but I was waiting for more news before telling about it. I hope Fanny's new place in Pommard will be as beautiful as this cellar. I guess she will be less cramped over there, and it may be closer to many of her vineyards (she's doing the pruning and much of the other hard work herself).

[Wine]

This post is so great, we had to share it on our wine wall.

[Paul Roberts]

Do I understand, Bert, that Pacalet's red Burgundy, including their premier crus, are made using 100% whole cluster fermentations? I noticed no crusher/destemmer in any of your pictures. Do you know whether the treading by feet occurs at a prescribed point during the fermentation, or is it simply near the end of fermentation, after the clusters soften and start to break down? As a winemaker, I always enjoy your posts, but this one especially fascinates me, for I assume the use of whole clusters, to this extent, is unusual in Burgundy. Maybe not. Certainly this is the ultra-traditionalist approach. But can you say how widespread it is today in Burgundy?

[Bertrand]

Hi Paul,

At this point as far as I remember (I should read again what Philippe Pacalet told me about his vinification methods in earlier visits) that's the way it goes here. The pigeage with the feet occurs after a few days, maybe a week, Philippe and the cellar master tasting the juices all along from time to time to decide when it's time to stomp the cap. I can't say if the whole-clustered approach is widespread today in Burgundy, especially that from year to year more vintners have been changing their work style in the pursuit of quality. I think many vintners opt for a part of the vat being whole-clustered and the rest destemmed, the percentage between the two varrying a lot.

[NISHAT KHAN]

great,workmanship