Red wine grapes often go through a "cold soak" prior to fermentation to allow the skins to release the color & flavor compounds that add to our enjoyment. Not all grape varieties need, long soak periods. Crushpad winemaker, Kian Tavakoli explains

Video Transcription

[Music Playing] Hello again everyone! In this installment of the CRUSHPAD’s Winemaker Minutes, we are actually going to focus on soaking. And there is that term called soak, but you can actually even call that soaking because if you have your bin in ambient solid temperature that is--you do a have that period of contact of juice to the skins before the fermentation starts. Now, the decision to do x number of days of soaking really again is dependent on the style of wine you want to make. The other real positive reason for doing soaking is that it allows your bin to homogenize in terms of sugar value, in terms of PH, and in terms of total acidity. During the course of this soaking period, if you have a few berries that are little bit dehydrated after a few days of soaking and redo punch the bin down once a day to make sure that is nice and homogenized by the end of the soaking period, you will have this dehydrated berries actually soak the sugar into the mast even more, so you have a much more accurate sugar value, which in turn will allow you to dictate how much if any amelioration you need to do to monitor your potential alcohol level. So now, in terms of how long do you soak your wine that depends on the style as well as well as the variety that you are making. If you are doing a Pinot, as I mentioned earlier, it is a thin skinned variety and it really benefits from quite a few days of skin contact in let say four, five, even six days the longer it is in contact with the skins prior to fermentation starting the more that fruit intensities got to get amplified in the wine. If you are making cab or if you are making Merlot, those varietals actually do not really benefit from going any more than three or four days of soaking because you are getting the color extracted and the tannins extracted particularly even as fermentation starts and you really is not interested in making a bright fruity type of a poured over ideal type of wine. After crushing, after destemming, and then crushing then it is taking those bins and putting them in either on cold room or stacking them up in an environment where is in the ambient solid temperature and will undergo the soaking period which is again that period between the end of crushing and where your fermentation starts. So, whether you are going to be doing a wine that is going to be very, very fleshy, very tight, very dense and tannic you would probably going to be doing two or three days of soaking. If you were dealing with a thin skinned variety or a type of wine that you want a lot of fruit intensity in the wine, then allowing the soaking to go for about five plus days will really get you that goal of getting that bright food component coming through. [Music Playing]