Date: October 09, 2009 @ 8:46 AM

Le Mistral

The Mistral comes to Oakville. What is it doing here? Isn’t Le Mistral French?

I first heard about Le Mistral when I was a kid. It’s the legendary, perhaps infamous, wind that attacks southern France for days on end. Rumor had it that it was so irritating that it was used as the source of an insanity plea in a case of murder. (It sweeps down from the north and can last for over a week.)

Our “Mistral” is a little more tame than the wind that blows down the Rhone, but it is air power that is part of the new grape receiving equipment at Nickel & Nickel. They named it Le Mistral in a moment of marketing genius, and it is doing a remarkable job. The blower (that would be the wind connection) is adjustable to separate raisins and small pieces of stem from the round, ripe berries.

Actually, the grapes are first sorted in the vineyards before picking. Then, we cluster sort as we pick and again when the grapes are received at the winery. (We have been hand sorting at Far Niente since 1982.) After the clusters drop into the destemmer, (a violent sounding piece of machinery that bats the cluster against a rotating cage and sends the berries, sans stems, through holes and simultaneously ejects the stems out the far end), it beats the heck out of removing all those stems by hand.

The berries drop onto a shaker table. If you stare too long as the berries vibrate across, you will likely feel sea sick or totally disoriented. Lots of the little raisins and half-shot berries drop through the slots in the table. Once the berries make a perfect carpet, they fall off the end onto another sorting table. Between those two, The Mistral Blows! Its wind shoots the light weight stuff off to the side. I guess it is one of those times where it pays to be plump! Face it! Plump berries must be…good berries…or happy berries…or the best berries…whatever. They are the ones that go to the crusher (another violent sounding piece of equipment that actually just cracks the berry’s skin but who is going to buy a “cracker” when you can have a “CRUSHER” – see what I mean?) and then to the tank.

All of this sorting is going to bring plenty of winemaking questions as we try to understand what we are gaining and what we are giving up in the raisins and little pieces of stems that used to end up in the tanks for fermentation.