Wine that's Mine will provide the facility, materials and equipment necessary to create a wine worthy of recognition.  The process starts with choosing a grape varietal and a style of wine.  Our services allow you to be as involved as you want- and we do the rest.

WTM has broken down the winemaking process into 6 steps:

1) Crushing: How to crush your fruit - crush, de-stem or leave whole clusters, / (various combinations).

2) Fermentation: Natural or choose your yeasts for desired flavors.

3) Press: Free-run or a mix of Free-run and pressed wine to establish your goals.

4) Aging: Choose the barrel type to match your wine and store.

5) Bottling: Choose your own glass, design unique packaging and label.

6) Long term aging: We provide long term aging for those special brands.

These are the basic steps that will be expand on throughout the process.  Some decisions are small, but everyone one is important.  We will help you make good decisions, avoid mistakes and basically work with mother nature from vineyard to the bottle.

The basic process of making wine has not changed in the past thousands of years-  making quality wine is a completely different story.

Regular Wine Making:

Most wine purchased in stores ranging between $12-$15, the grapes have been picked by a machine.  A truck backs up to the winery and fills the hopper with bunches of grapes, and usually some "MOG" (material other than grapes such as leaves) as well.  the screw feeds the grapes into the cursher-destemer and grapes are crushed by rollers in the hopper.  The pulp is then pumped into a pneumatic press and a rubber membrane is slowly inflated pressing the grape pulp against the perforated stainless steel cylinder.  The juice is collected in a tray from which it is pumped to stainless steel settling tanks enclosed in cooling jackets. Here the juice might be covered with a blanket of inert gas such as carbon dioxide to prevent oxidation.  Special enzymes may be added to encourage some of the suspended solids to settle out of the liquid after about 24 hours in the settling tanks.  Now the much cleaner grape juice is pumped into temperature-controlled stainless steel fermentations tanks.  The juice is inoculated with a strain of yeast and temperatures are usually brought up as high as possible in order to speed up fermentation so that the machines could be used for another batch of grapes.  Wine is then racked off the lees becoming cleaner and more manageable, and placed into holding tanks protected from oxygen.  Wine is stored at low temperatures until required to fill an order so as to keep it as fresh as possible.  Wine is usually bottled by means of a high speed bottling line just before being shipped, keeping storage costs low.

High Quality, Wine making with Wine That's Mine:

Hand held bunches or grapes are hand picked from the vineyard and packed into wooden crates.  Temperature controlled trucks deliver the hand picked grapes and any unripe or damaged moldy grapes are discarded by us (our sorting process).  People hand pick each cluster of grapes, and carry them to the crusher-destemer where the stalks are removed and most of the grape skins are crushed.  The settings can be adjusted according to how many stems and whole grapes are required.  For less tannic grapes such as Pinot Noir some of the stems may be retained at this stage to give the wine structure.  The grape must, including the all important skins for color, flavor, and tannin is then taken to an open-top fermenter, which these days is often made of stainless steel, but we use good old fashion oak which traditionally was used but is very difficult to maintain in large lot wineries (we don't like to cut anything out which compromises the taste of the wine, so we maintain a true oak fermentation, adding to the complexity of the flavors).  Here natural yeasts present in the atmosphere will slowly set in motion the alcoholic fermentation.  Sometimes people may want to cool the must before fermentation to give some extra skin contact time, while others like to heat the must immediately to encourage the fermentation.  Sugar levels start to fall as the level of alcohol rises and the carbon dioxide given off pushes up the grape skins and pulp to form a cap, which protects the must against oxidation (pretty wild that this all happens naturally).  The cap is hand plunged down several times a day to prevent drying out.  After the alcoholic fermentation is over sometimes we allow an extended period of maceration to extract even more complexities from the skins, while other times we transfer the wine immediately into oak barrels (these are the options we will discuss, and they all depend on what you like to drink).  In either case, the second, malotactic fermentation takes place.  The solids left at the bottom of the fermentation vat are then taken to a press, we use the traditional basket press, where we hand press each batch of wine.  The pressed wine is much more tannic and in some cases left completely as a separate batch.  The wine is then aged in oak barrels for about 9 months and will occasionally be racked off its sediment.  Depending on the type of wine you want, a fining agent might be added to clarify the wine, other times a few good rackings will do the trick.  Any case the wine is ready for bottling and for you to enjoy.