If you’ve ever taken a winery tour, you probably have a general idea of how the winemaking process works. Grapes are brought to the winery “crush pad,” dumped into a hopper and fed into a crusher-destemmer where the stems are removed and the grapes are ‘crushed’ to extract the juice. With reds, the ‘must’ (unfermented
juice and skins) is then conveyed to a container, usually a stainless steel tank, for fermentation. After fermentation completes, the new wine is pressed off its skins and transferred to barrels for aging. At Cakebread Cellars, white grapes are fed directly to a press where the juice is gently extracted without crushing (called whole cluster pressing) and only the juice is fermented.
Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, not really. What you can’t ‘see’ while visiting a winery are the plethora of decisions, large and small, that winemakers make every day, especially during harvest. At Cakebread Cellars, the ‘big’ decisions—when to harvest, how to ferment, what barrels to use, how and when to bottle, etc.—are made by Winemaker Julianne Laks. But day-today operations of our two cellars are managed by our Cellar Master, Brian Lee. Brian has been with us 22 years—his entire professional career—since graduating from the Viticulture and
Enology Department of the University of California at Davis.
Ask Brian what his days are like during harvest, and he has difficulty enumerating everything he has to keep track of, which includes managing cellar staff, coordinating grape deliveries and consulting on fermentation decisions. But ask what his main challenge is and he responds immediately: “Tank space!”.
During harvest, winemaking resembles a shell game. Winemakers have a rough idea of the total volume of grapes that will arrive at the winery during the 6– 8 weeks of harvest, but they don’t know when. In leisurely vintages, when the grapes can be picked at nicely spaced intervals (early ripeners like Sauvignon Blanc followed by mid-season maturers like Merlot, culminating in late-season stragglers like Cabernet Sauvignon), Brian can
complete fermentations and clear tank space for the next batches of grapes in an orderly fashion. But when weather patterns during harvest conspire to ripen more than one variety at once—e.g., cool weather at the outset of harvest delays maturity of early ripening varieties, but sudden heat spells accelerate maturity of later-ripening ones—managing the logistics of filling and emptying dozens of tanks can become daunting.
Not for Brian, though.
“I love it,” Brian says. “I love the challenge of managing tank strategy and flow. It’s the most fun thing I do.”
Like a general rallying his troops, Brian cycles—literally—during harvest between our cellars in Rutherford and Oakville, just a few hundred yards apart and bisected by a small creek. The Rutherford cellar is devoted to white wine production, while the more spacious Oakville cellar is for reds. Between the two, Brain manages a permanent cellar staff of eight—which swells to 20 during harvest—keeping them busy filling, draining and cleaning tanks and barrels, monitoring fermentations, creating blends, maintaining sanitation and attending to all the myriad tasks that
constitute the laborious and at times very complex task of making Cakebread Cellars wines. It’s a prolonged act of creation that we would be hard-pressed to accomplish without our Master Tank-tician.
