Chateau Ste. Michelle’s Canoe Ridge Estate Winery Installs New State-of-the-Art Reserve Cellar
Woodinville, Wash.
As part of an ongoing commitment to continually elevate wine quality, Chateau Ste. Michelle’s Canoe Ridge Estate red winery in Eastern, Washington built a new Reserve Cellar featuring state-of-the art sorting and fermentation equipment. The new Reserve Cellar began production in early September at the start of the 2014 Washington harvest.
The Reserve Cellar is built within the Canoe Ridge Estate red wine facility employing cutting edge technology to gently handle fruit and minimize impurities for Chateau Ste. Michelle’s Single Vineyard and Ethos Reserve Wines.
“This dedicated Reserve Cellar approach gives our winemaking team access to the best possible crush equipment and helps us maintain a small winemaking mentality for our top tier wines,” says Chateau Ste. Michelle’s red winemaker Raymon McKee. “The new receiving equipment and fermentation area allows us to enhance fruit expression and take wine quality to the next level.”
The new equipment is part of a three step process designed to gently destem, crush and sort the winery’s top grapes.
“Having a fermentation of mostly whole grapes, without any green material like leaves and stems, is critical and allows us to extract more ripe flavors out of each grape,” explains McKee. “We had a chance to run trials with the new sorting equipment and the results exploded out of the glass. The wine had more fruit purity, complexity and softness.”
The Pellanc Selectiv destemmer uses a unique design and motion to gently remove the berries from the stems, leaving mostly whole berries.
The Della Toffala peristaltic pump moves whole berries through the process without breaking them open.
The most important piece of new technology is the VitiSort optical sorter, designed to sort out everything but the berries, removing all leaves, imperfect berries, and stems.
VitiSort begins with a vibratory conveyor that gently shakes the grapes to separate MOG (Material Other than Grapes). Single grapes fall from the end of the conveyor into the sorter, while a high speed camera that uses 4,000 scans per second inspects each grape. Any unwanted material is ejected, allowing good grapes to pass from the sorter into a hopper for delivery to the fermentation tank.
“We could not be treating these grapes any better, even if we had an army of people individually picking each berry from the stem,” adds McKee. “ This new equipment has revolutionized the way we sort grapes and ultimately allows us to make wines that are more pure expressions of our estate vineyards.”
The winery is also experimenting with new fermenters, including concrete and oak upright fermenters and puncheons. “These different vessels will give us more complexities in our wines, and tools to find new expressions in our estate grapes,” says McKee.
A leader in Innovation and Sustainability
The Canoe Ridge Estate winery also recently earned LIVE sustainability certification. LIVE is a third party certification of environmentally and socially responsible winegrowing in the Northwest. The winery’s sustainability practices include reducing the winery’s use of energy, water and waste, and a commitment to worker safety.
Chateau Ste. Michelle is one of the few premium wineries in the world with two state-of-the-art winemaking facilities, one devoted to whites at its Woodinville Chateau outside of Seattle and another customized to red wine production at its Canoe Ridge Estate winery in Eastern Washington. The Canoe Ridge Estate winery and vineyard is located on a south-facing, wind-swept slope on the north bank of the Columbia River in the Horse Heaven Hills AVA Planted in 1991, the Canoe Ridge Estate vineyard includes 559 acres of Merlot, Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Syrah and Grenache.
About Chateau Ste. Michelle
Founded in 1934, Chateau Ste. Michelle pioneered vinifera grape growing in Washington state and has been producing classic European varietal wines under the Ste. Michelle label since 1967. The winery combines an ongoing dedication to research with a commitment to classic winemaking traditions. The winery owns 3,500 acres of vineyards in the Columbia Valley of Eastern Washington, including Canoe Ridge Estate and Cold Creek, which are LIVE and Salmon Safe certified. Chateau Ste. Michelle enjoys winemaking partnerships with two of the world’s most distinguished vintners. Col Solare is an alliance with Tuscany’s Piero Antinori and Eroica Riesling is a partnership with the Mosel’s Ernst Loosen.
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For further information:
Lynda Eller
media@ste-michelle.com
