Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/81015
WINERY SOIL & CELLAR winemaker. Coopers are expand- ing their selection beyond upright wooden tanks to include open-top wood fermentors, truncated tanks, and round and oval casks. Both stainless steel and wood tank pro- ducers continue to develop vessels with variable capacity, using differ- ent types of moveable or floating lid technology. CONCRETE: IT'S BACK Concrete fermentation vessels have been used in winemaking for thousands of years, although they declined in popularity throughout most of the 20th century. In the past decade, however, there has been a renewed interest in con- crete. It has the advantage of being semi-permeable, allowing for a slow infiltration of oxygen during fermentation without the addition of any oak character. The tempera- ture retention of concrete allows it to be controlled with less energy than stainless steel. Concrete also conducts heat less efficiently than steel, so variations in ambient tem- perature have a lower impact on the temperature of the contents of the concrete tank. This is particu- larly useful during extended mac- eration, where concrete holds the temperatures more evenly. The French firm Nomblot produc- es the majority of concrete tanks used in the U.S. wine industry, ranging in capacity from 70 gallons to 10,000 gallons or more. Over time, Nomblot has designed its vessels in assorted shapes, includ- ing rectangular, square, egg, ellipti- cal, trapezoidal, truncated cone and round; each shape imparts different characteristics to the fermentation, and a winemaker can choose the shape based on the style of wines to be produced. In the U.S., Sonoma Cast Stone offers concrete tanks in a variety of sizes and shapes, produced at the company's facility in Petaluma, Calif. Egg-shaped concrete tanks in particular have sparked wine- makers' interests in recent years. Although they are predominantly used for white-wine fermentations, WWW.VWM-ONLINE.COM SEPT - OCT 2012 VINEYARD & WINERY MANAGEMENT 35 Egg-shaped concrete tanks, such as this example from Sonoma Cast Stone, are capturing winemakers' interest.