I have to move the wine I have in my 30 gallon barrel out soon, it's been in there for a little over a year, so I'm willing to use that barrel to hold the group's wine for a year or so. Of course, if people don't want to do that they they are certainly welcome to take their own carboy home. Why anyone would opt to age wine in glass when there is an oportunity to age it in wood is a question for another day. Actually, lets talk about it now. There are certain very real benefits to bulk aging in a barrel.
1. Flavor. The oak barrel adds an oak and vanilla component to the wine that you may or may not be able to achieve by using chips, staves or beans.
2. Micro-oxidization. Doesn't happen in glass
3. Concentration. Same thing. As time goes by a barrel will evaporate some of the wine away. That doesn't happen thru glass. It concentrates the flavor. Can you taste it? I think so. If it was a new barrel you would loose a lot more wine because the barrel soaks up alot itself. So far I think I've had to add about 3 gallons back into the barrel to keep it topped up, most of that in the beginning when the barrel was new.
Here's how I see the group process going.
We get teh grapes on a Saturday, stem and crush them and start the fermentation process. (All hands on deck) The grapes need to be punched down 6 times a day or so for a week or more. (one man job) As the grapes ferment they produce CO2 which physically raises the cap of pommace up out of the liquid. You need to punch the grapes back down, I have a gigantic restaurant sized potato masher that I use. (Ever notice that purple grapes doen't have purple flesh? The juice from purple grapes is the color of chardonney until it ferments on the skins. For example, some of the worlds best champagnes are made with pinot noir, a purple grape. The grapes are crushed and pressed the same day, they don't ferment on the skins and so the must is white.) Five or ten minutes of punching down, and churning the must gets the grape skins back under the surface, where they can extract color and flavor. (The other way to do it is by a pump over, where you pump juice from the bottom of the tank back up and over the cap. Same effect.) It needs to be done every few hours and you can't skip a punch down. It also helps to control the temps, ferments can get pretty warm, not necessarily a bad thing in a full bodied red wine.
The wine will go until it is dry and the cap falls. SOmetime after we are about 2/3 of the way thru we'll add a malo-lactc culture and the yeast fermentation and the malolactic fermentation will run together to the finish. Once the cap falls it's time to press. (3-4 man job) We'll siphon out as much of the free run juice as we can then scoop the cap into the press and squeeze it dry. All of the juice (It's actually very raw wine at this point) will go into a vessel to settle out the gross lees overnight (basicly a sheetload of yeast and pulp the needs to stay out of the barrel so it doesnt produce H2S, a strong sulfer stink that you REALLY want to avoid), then it will get pumped off the gross lees into the oak barrel where it will spend the next year or so.
The real work is grape day, press day and of course bottling day. Bodies are always in short supply on grape day and on crush day. Miraculously, no-one has other plans when it's bottling day. It's like a law of nature or something.
Obviously all of these jobs can be done with one or 2 people. But it's a WHOLE lot easier with more hands Not to mention more fun.
PTN