The Winemaking
Chester works with individual parcels of fruit that display different flavour profiles that are influenced by the unique soil characteristics and meso climates of our vineyards. Each parcel is picked and vinified separately to highlight the individual characters that contribute complexity to the final blend.
Chester assumes dual roles as chief wine maker and viticulturist at d’Arenberg. He spends a great deal of his time in the vineyards prior to harvest sampling grapes to determine ripeness and flavour intensity. This in part explains his exceptional wine making talent of understanding the characteristics of each individual vineyard.
Chester likens his wine making process to the art of sculpture; a very hands on-on process that requires an intimate knowledge and feel for your raw materials before you are able to express your artistic vision.
Chester’s philosophy is to make wines that have great fragrance, fruit palate texture and length. The finish of the wine must have a natural, fine balance of acidity and a complex structure of tannins.
"I aim to make loudest, most flowery fragrant and most fruit-flavoured wines that have great palate texture and are free of excess oak. I look for tannins that are long, lively, gritty and youthful with fragrant fruit-mineral notes.
It is my aim to never make a wine that looks sterile, like some other reputable wineries produce. I want to see it all my wines; I want a wine that has edges of all sorts of complexities such as spices, meats, compost and forest floors etc…
One other focus is to make a wine that is not going to go too earthy or bitumen - tarry with age. Some producers make wines that have oodles of fruit; they’re ripe, rich and gutsy, but in a few years these wines may show inherent problems from their production. That is fat, blousy, and chocolate and tar with short palate life. This is also the opposite of what we aim to produce."
Age-old winemaking techniques
At d’Arenberg we handcraft all our wines and press them in wooden baskets using the very gentle, traditional ‘Coq’ and ‘Bromley & Tregoning’ presses, for both reds and whites. The presses are both old soldiers, dating from approximately 1860, and then we had the original ‘Coq’ press replicated in 1940, because we liked its gentle action so much.
The main job of the wine press is to get juice, or fermented wine, from the grape skins and pulp. For white wines, this happens before fermentation (so the more delicate whites do not pick up any colour or phenolics from the skins) and for the reds, after fermentation, so that the action of the ferment and the alcohol has extracted the good tannins and flavour profiles from the skins.
Basket pressing all of our wines makes for a very labour-intensive exercise, but the quality of results justifies this for us. The pressing action is very controlled and is extremely gentle.
We have also used our collective imaginations here in coming up with a way to make basket pressing oxygen free, thereby preventing oxidation in our whites. This is achieved by using a big plastic bag and some dry ice, which encases the whole basket. d’Arenberg is unique in that it is the only winery in Australia to use this age-old basket press method for white wines as well as reds.
Chester believes that one of the advantages of basket pressing is cleaner juice, as it is partially filtered through the mass of pulp it drains through in the basket.
This saves time in settling and clearing the juice, and brings the procedure much closer to how we like things – minimal interference which enables us to preserve quality.
All our wines feature the foot trod/basket pressed logo as a 'badge of honour' for the hard work that goes into producing our wonderful wines. There have been jokes that maybe a cellar hand would get the logo branded on his enlarged calf muscles after a long vintage of foot treading!
The Wine making Process
A 'virtual walk' around the winery during vintage
Due to OH&S regulations we can't take visitors to d'Arenberg into the winery during vintage time but here's the next best thing. A pictorial guide through the d'Arenberg winery and wine making process from start to finish.
Simply click on the first image and then use the arrows to navigate through the process.
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The Grapes Arrive
Day and night, throughout vintage, grapes arrive at the winery. At the weigh bridge where they are recorded.
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A very gentle crusher
Once the grapes are recorded they are then crushed in our Demoisy open mouthed, rubber toothed crusher (which came originally from Burgundy in France). This old but faithful crusher is incredibly gentle and does not extract the harsh, one dimensional tannins from the stalks and seeds. In fact, it is so gentle,that even unsuspecting lizards who get caught up in the harvest escape unscathed. Many whole berries also make it through the crusher and these add an extra dimension of carbonic maceration to the mix.
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Concrete open fermenters
All of our red wines are fermented in either traditional, wax-lined concrete open fermenters, or new stainless steel open fermenters. As well as being Chief Winemaker and Viticulturist, Chester is also a bit of a dab hand at steel design - he designed and had built on site these new steel fermenters to the exact specifications of the original concrete ones.
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Submerging the cap (the mixture of seeds, skin and pulp)
Fermentation of reds often takes place in open fermenters. The cap of fermenting juice and grape skins is kept submerged by fixed ‘heading down’ boards . No pumping over or plunging is preformed. so as to extract the right flavours solvently rather than mechanically.
Each batch is kept separate and the whole process is very intricate and labour intensive. -
Co-fermenting Shiraz and Viognier
This artistic picture from vintage 2007 shows co-fermentation of shiraz and viognier. Once we have drained off the juice from the viognier for The Last Ditch, the 'cake' of skins, pulp and seeds, is placed into some of the shiraz ferments. The two wine varieties then happily ferment together with the viognier adding fragrance and floral lift to the shiraz. The resulting wine, The Laughing Magpie, has a wonderful psychedelic purple colour- it's easy to see where it comes from!
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Foot treading in an open fermenter
We use traditional heading down boards, which keeps the cap of grape skins submerged under the fermenting juice, to better extract the flavours, colour and tannin. Our cellar guys and girls foot tread/ mix the cap of fermenting skins in the open fermenters to cool the skins and add a little extraction to the juice.
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Digging out the open fermenters- hard work but someone's got to do it!
No machinery here!
Another labour-intensive process at d'Arenberg is the digging out of concrete fermenters. No forklift or automated scoops here, just good ol' fashion, blister-forming shovel work.
Once the wine is three quarters of the way through primary fermentation it is tasted daily until the extraction is ideal. Then the juice is pumped off and the skins/must dug out of the fermenters and into the basket for pressing. -
Wooden Basket Press from France
We still basket press all our wines, even our white grape varieties. This would make d’Arenberg one of the last remaining wineries to do so.
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Gentle Pressing
Chester believes that one of the advantages of basket pressing is cleaner juice, as it is partially filtered through the mass of pulp it drains through in the basket.
This saves time in settling and clearing the juice, and brings the procedure much closer to how we like things – minimal interference which enables us to preserve quality. -
That's a big barrel!
While most of our wines are matured in small oak barriques, we do use larger oak casks such as this one for wines like The Stump Jump and the Red Musketeers.
This oval cask was purchased from one of the local South Australian beer brewers (Southwark) in the early 60's and is said to be the largest oval cask in the Southern Hemisphere. It is made from oak that was sourced from the Mississippi Valley in America.Due to its age, it doesn't impart much flavour influence, but it is a fantastic storage facility and impressive photo background!
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Time to rest and mature (under the watchful eye of d'Arry)
All of the wines in the range from Chester's Champion's upwards spend considerable time in small oak (ranging from 8-22 months)
They’re all fermented and matured separately in French and American oak barriques, and we keep them apart until the very last moment, when we marry them at the blending stage. This allows Chester to understand the individual soil plots as they develop.
It also means that while an individual barrel of wine may, on its own appear to be extreme in terms of tannin or a certain flavour, once blended with other plots becomes seamless and integrated. -
The Blending Bench
The whole winemaking process at d’Arenberg is conducted along essentially small-batch winemaking lines. This means that we keep separate different parcels of fruit from the time of harvesting, through fermentation, pressing and maturation in barrel or tank, so when Chester and fellow winemakers Jack Walton and Toby Porter come to the blending stage, they have a wealth of different components with which to create a given wine.
This makes for painstaking and intricate operations in the cellar (just ask the cellar hands!), but the rewards are obvious – a range of blending options with which to create complex, harmonious, integrated wines with seamless balance and wide spectrums of fruit and flavour. -
Estate bottled wines
To ensure all of our hard work and commitment in the vineyard and cellars are protected at all costs, we bottle each of our wines on the property. Our quality control procedures include the most advanced bottling and filling technology that ensures each wine reaches you in top condition.
Natural minimal processing (which means we never fine or filter our red wines) ensures maximum flavour. d’Arenberg is perhaps the last small to medium sized producer that still undertakes all of these three functions – growing, winemaking and bottling and packaging, all undertaken at d’Arenberg.