Winemaking

The Old World ambiance of our Cellar and Cask Room sets the stage for our labor intensive protocols which focus on a less invasive use of gravity, minimizing the need for filtration. Our Award Wining wines are hand crafted with emphasis focused on making the highest quality wines possible.

All of our Estate Vineyards are harvested by hand and then sorted into small lugs. The lugs are then brought to the winery crush pad for processing. Once sorted, the lugs are dumped into our German crusher desteming machine where the red wine grapes are processed. The fruit is taken off the stems and crushed, where it then falls into a shoot which transports the fruit into the fermentation tanks located 20 feet below in the winery.

Our restored 1960's German bladder press is the gentlest press available, allowing us to avoid the crushing of seeds which can impart bitterness in wine. The grape clusters are sorted and then loaded into the press by hand. We press our white wine varieties whole cluster to extract only the best juice from the grapes.

We ferment approximately 3 tons of red wine fruit in each of our 800 gallon stainless steel tanks. The ratio of height to width allows us to punch the caps of the fermenting red grapes by hand.

Once in the tank the must (fermenting grapes) is chilled to the appropriate temperature and prepared for fermentation. Once fermentation begins and the skins separate from the juice, we begin the Old World technique of punching the resulting caps down by hand with a stainless steel mallet. This is done four times a day with additional pump overs twice daily. These techniques allow us to extract exceptional color and flavors from the fruit. Once fermentation is over, the wine is racked off to a settling tank and the remaining skins are gently pressed. The wine settles for a few days in a tank and then it is barreled down for aging in our cask room.

The wines at Wolf Mountain are more European in style than Californian. As a result, we use 100% French Oak Barrels for the aging of all our wines. The emphasis is on the rich fruit flavors our terroir offers and not on excessive oak flavor. Our philosophy is to blend our grape varieties to achieve more complexity, as is done throughout Europe, where the climate is similar to the North Georgia mountains.

Sparkling Wines

Wolf Mountain Vineyards produces three types of sparkling wines using the French-style Méthode Champenoise. This multistep process, developed in France's Champagne region, puts the still wine through a second fermentation in the bottle.

More About Méthode Champenoise