Quick
Tour • How It
All Began • Building
A Winery • Progress
Tasting
Room • Production
Facilities • Services
A Quick
Tour of Pentamere Winery
Click on thumbnails to view
larger photos
| The
Pit |
|
When
you walk into Pentamere, the first thing you
will probably notice is that half the floor
is missing. This allows us to readily dispose
of self-styled wine critics...uh, it allows
for the large, high tanks used to ferment the
wine. The biggest tank, easily visible in the
far corner of the hole, is 3000 liters, which
is about 800 gallons. ("Do you want that
to go, or will you drink it here?"). There
are also several 1500-liter tanks. All the tanks
were imported from Italy, where they know a
bit about making wine. |
| The
Tasting Room |
The
building is over a hundred years old, but until
recently it was effectively disguised as a greasy-spoon
restaurant, with ancient tile floors and wallpaper
that has to be seen to be believed. Just removing
the tile and plaster allowed the simple beauty
of the original building to shine through (well,
removing tile and plaster, cleaning wall, sanding
floor, removing several decades of grease, building
rails for the new hole in the floor, renovating
the bathrooms…). |
|
| The
Cellar |
|
We're proud of what's been
done upstairs, but the cellar is even more important.
In order to have a winery, we need wine, and
downstairs is where the wine is made and stored.
Our small fermentation tanks
fill up a large part of the basement all by
themselves. The wine wouldn't come out very
well if we tried to ferment every type in one
tank! The empty tanks are said to actually be
full of vintner's brains.
The wooden barrels are for aging our "big reds" and our
Chardonnay. You just
can't have Chardonnay without genuine, Kentucky-made,
oaken barrels (or so we're told).
Our
grape basket press (used for squeezing grapes—sorry,
no picture yet) is, like the tanks, straight
from Italy. It's the next step up from stomping
the grapes with your feet. |
| Bottling |
The
open area under the hole is also used to bottle
the wine. The miniature-hat rack holds the bottles
as they drip-dry from the sulfur sterilizing
solution (you don't want your wine flavored
with this stuff—trust us). That big metal
thing that looks a little like a buffet table
fills the bottles—six at a time. Those
two red machines that look like, uh, strange
red machines put the cork in the bottleneck.
All this is done by enthusiastic volunteer labor.
The less enthusiastic volunteers are the ones
who put the labels on the bottles, a job for
which the phrase "mind numbing" might
have been invented.
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|
At the back of the
cellar is the lab. This is where the emerging
wine is tested and re-tested for sugar, acidity,
alcohol (believe it or not, there is alcohol in
all our wines), sulfur, and all the other things
that go into a great batch of wine. Every once
in a while, we even perform a taste test, too.
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