Harvest in the Winery

The Basics of Pressing

In English sparkling winemaking, the fundamental goal of pressing is to draw the finest juice from the year’s grape harvest. It needs to be done delicately to ensure only the right qualities are extracted, as Jack explains.

“You want a gentle, even pressing of the grapes. If you don’t, you’re not going to get very good juice extraction. You’ll press a certain amount of grapes really hard and other grapes not at all. And that juice is going to be incredibly phenolic, because you’re really ramming those grapes and squeezing the skins and stems. So it could potentially end up being quite green, bitter and astringent.”

This gentle extraction is the reason why grapes were traditionally pressed underfoot. Today’s ingeniously engineered mechanical presses do the job in far larger quantities and a fraction of the time. Better still, we can calibrate them to different pressures to extract different qualities from the harvested grapes.

The Coquard Press

Type of press: Hydraulic

Capacity: 4 tonnes

Age: 15 years

Specialism: Chardonnay

Originating in Champagne, the Coquard press is a winemaking icon. And since ours was the first in the UK, it’s a little piece of English wine history. It’s a very hands-on press and we love the control it gives us over our press cuts. It’s great for Chardonnay but less suited to pressing the Pinots, as it tends to extract a little too much colour from the grapes.

Jack’s notes: “It’s a traditional French-style press, very gentle and very romantic. Coquard basically took the idea of a wooden basket press and turned it on its side. There’s a big horizontal hydraulic ram attached to a slanted plate that squeezes the whole mass of grapes when it pushes forward, but then also turns them over as it pulls back. So you get that rotation of grapes and even pressing mechanically. 

“The max pressure is only around 1.4 bar, so the juice we get is really light and delicate, minimal phenolics and lots of fruity, floral notes.”

The Willmes Press

Type of press: Pneumatic

Capacity: 4 tonnes

Age: 11 years

Specialisms: Rosé 

Our trusty Willmes has been with us nearly as long as our Coquard, and it’s still going strong. Like the Bucher, it’s a pneumatic press, and it has one very handy advantage over its larger, newer neighbour. The Willmes seals completely shut, which offers us some additional useful winemaking options.

Jack’s notes: “This year, we did a maceration in the Willmes. We loaded the grapes in, added some CO2, sealed everything up overnight, and then pressed in the morning, just to bleed some extra colour out of the skins. We could only do that in the Willmes. With the Bucher and the Coquard, when you put the grapes in, the juice just starts draining out. So that’s where it really comes into its own.”

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