Pumpovers, yeast food, tasting juice.

I got to taste juice from several tanks that had just barely started fermenting, it was my first time tasting that many different juice samples all at the same time, and the first time I've been able to detect distinct differences between samples of what's basically still just grape juice. I tasted syrah from two different vineyards, one was much less extracted than the other, so it got additional pumpover time. Nathalie likes to do most of the work early in the fermentation cycle, and once the wine nears the end of primary fermentation she prefers to leave it pretty much alone. I tasted one roussanne and two marsanne tanks. The roussanne was very pretty, rich, and very floral. The marsanne was more reserved, with more minerality and some banana bread character to it.
We're doing longer pumpovers than we were doing at Gourgonnier, both for additional extraction and to help kick off fermentation. We're also doing something else that I keep forgetting the word for, I think it's debranchage, it's essentially a more aggressive version of pumpovers, where nearly all the juice is drained out of the cuve, in this case it's gravity-fed into a concrete cuve below the floor of the winery, then it's pumped back into it's original cuve, which breaks the cap up more than just regular remontage, and gains additional color and extraction from the grapes. We also did the second step in a process called 'pied de cuve' which is an attempt to re-start a cuve that has stopped fermenting. About 5hl of juice is pulled off of the stuck tank, and 5 pulled off of another tank that's fermenting very rigorously, and they're put together in another fermenter overnight, which lets the happy yeast from the good tank start going after the sugar in the stuck tank. Today we pumped the whole 10hl into the stuck tank, and tomorrow we'll find out if the whole process worked.
Most of the harvesting here is done by machine, and I got to have a look at the harvester today, it looks like a monster truck with teeth. I'll try to remember to get a picture tomorrow.