Pump Over

Posted 10/10/2008 at 03:33 AM by Dirk

This is the season of the "Pump-Over." It seemed like a good time to clarify the subject in this blog so I decided to see what Wikipedia had to say about the pump-over. (Our private librarian, Carol, rolls her eyes at the mention of Wikipedia, while my son, Trevor, may define the wiki-enabled generation who wants the information even if it is from unverified sources...which may leave him better prepared for modern political advertisements.) Wikipedia said nothing, nada, nul, zip... (of course, I may have looked it up the wrong way but it is supposed to be smart enough to predict and overcome my user errors.) It did give me an immense list of different types of pumps.

Back to the Pump-Over. If you can do your Monty Python impersonation now, you would say; "Ohhhh...it's eaazay!"

A pump-over is when one takes the juice (or wine) from a valve near the bottom of the tank and pumps it over the top of the floating cap of skins that forms in the tank. It is a way to get: more color from the skins, more even mixing, more even temperatures, more flavor, more tannins or as my Dad would say, it makes it "more better."

Not all pump-overs are equal. There are lots of ways to pump over. Ask a bunch of winemakers how to handle a pump-over and be prepared to hear answers that are completely contradictory. We can be like that!

Imagine that you are the winemaker. With pump-overs, you only have to decide how often, how many, how long, how warm, how many gallons/ ton, how fast, how gentle...for each tank...and then adjust it to each stage of the fermentation and to how the flavors and tannins progress. It's best if you also remember how you did it last year and how it tasted yesterday...and last year. Simply put, there are lots of reasons and ways to tinker with the pump over each day of each fermentation. If you like to make wine, you like to tinker and experiment.

Generally, pump-overs are more gentle and shorter when the grapes first get into the tank. It is a stage where the color is slowly coming out of the skins and there isn't any heat or alcohol to help with extraction. Once the fermentation begins, the pump-overs become more frequent and longer in an attempt to pull out the best of the flavors by moving larger volumes of juice through the warm skins but the warmer it is, the faster the fermentation progresses and the less time it leaves to get all that the grapes have to offer.

Towards the end of fermentation, pump-overs usually become more gentle and infrequent.

Whether it is once a day or five times in a day, this is the time that we are hooking up to each tank, climbing on top of it, checking its cap, recording its brix level, measuring its temperature, tasting its progress and enjoying the most obvious sounds and smells of crafting red wine.

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