'It has to take its time': How to make award-winning P.E.I. wines

John Rossignol says you can't rush things when you're makingfine wine.

In fact, the only time you need to hurryis when you're picking bunches of grapes during the short harvest season.

Rossignolstarted the Island's first wineryin Little Sands, P.E.I., 25 years ago.

All of his organicgrapes are picked the old-fashioned way by hand.

"This is a very manual operation. Hands on, small-scale, local," he said.

Knowing exactly when to harvest

Thereare a few ways to determine when the grapes have their highest sugar content to produce alcohol.

"One way is with a little gadget called a refractometer," said Rossignol.

"We just take a grape, squeeze a drop of juice onto the meter, and then have a look at it. That tells us how ripe it is. So if the sweetness is ok, we're ready to pick."

The other way? "We just taste them," he said.

How to make award-winning P.E.I. wines

8 years ago

Duration 1:02

How to make award-winning P.E.I. wines

Rossignol said by the end of each day, the pickers have harvested about a ton of grapes.

They are special cold climate grapes such as Marchale Foch and Lucie Kuhlmann that have been developed for cool regions, like P.E.I.

Removing the stems

The next chore in making wine is to remove all the stems from the mountains of grapes.

"You can imagine how much work it would be to pull all these grapes off the stems," said Rossignol.

The grape bunches are dumped into a machine that separates the stems from the grapes.

"This is the most action we ever see in wine making," he joked.

Clusters of stems comeout of one end of the machine, while the pulverized grapes, including the skins, seeds and juice are pumped into huge stainless steel vats.

Stomping out the juice

For centuries, people stomped on the grapes in their barefeet to separate the juice from the slurry of skins and seeds.

These days, a basket press does the job, by pumping air into an inflatable inner tube in an enclosed barrel.

As the tube expands in the barrel, it forces out pure grape juice.

"It's quite marvelous. It exerts quite a bit of pressure, and 80 per cent of all that mash will be converted to juice," said Rossignol.

But Rossignol said he still misses the old-fashioned grape stomps.

"We had to use to use feet without socks to stomp on the grapes," he said. "That's kind of a nice feel, you know feeling the grapes squishing between your toes. We still do this once in a while for fun and therapy."

Turning grape juice into wine

Rossignol saod up until this point in the process, it's almost as if he's running a juice factory.

But it's the next all important step that will make the difference betweena can ofgrape juice and a fine glass of wine.

The juice is poured into 5,000-litre outdoor holding tanks, where fermentation begins. The tank is sealed shut for the winter to allow it to settle.

'It has to take its time'

The next stage takes place inside the facility the following year. The wine is aged in stacks of large white oak barrels.

"This has been done for hundreds of years in the Old World, and it just seems to work," said Rossignol.

"We'll probably let it sit here for another year. There's no hurry. It has to take its time."

The final stage is bottling the wine. The machine can do a thousand bottles at a time.

Rossignol said this year has been a good year, but added he won't be able to celebrate 2016until the wine is ready to drinka few years down the road.

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