Winemaking at Nevada City Winery

Have you ever stopped to think about the work put into the making of your glass of wine? Today when I was downtown, I saw the staff at Nevada City Winery work on one of the first steps of winemaking. The grapes came from a vineyard in Clarksburg, CA. The grapes are white grapes and were being made into Chardonnay. Although you can grow grapes to make Chardonnay in Nevada County, it is a little too warm, according to someone from Sierra Starr Winery who was waiting to pick up his grapes. He explained the process to me. It starts with a bin containing just under one ton, or 2,000 pounds, of grapes. The grapes are slowly dumped into a hopper where the stems and leaves are removed. From there, they fall into a crusher where the juicing process begins. The juice that the grapes make is called must. It contains the skins and isn’t filtered, so it’s pretty thick. The must is pushed to the last step, the press, where the skins are removed and the must is filtered. The product is moved inside where they begin to ferment it. Mark, the very experienced winemaker for Nevada City Winery, was outside helping with this process. If you would like to watch this in action, you can see it all from the deck at Nevada City Winery. If you want to taste the end product, both Sierra Starr and Nevada City Winery uses these grapes to create Chardonnay. Click on the photos below to view them larger or visit our Flickr to see them.