Winemaking

Cask Room

Harvesting the Fruit

Our State of the Art Europress

Gravity Filled Fermentation Tanks

Tank Room

100% French Oak Barrels

The Old World ambiance of our Cellar and Cask Room sets the stage for our labor intensive protocols which focus on a less invasive use of gravity, minimizing the need for filtration. Our Award Winning wines are hand crafted with emphasis focused on making the highest quality wines possible.

All of Wolf Mountain’s Estate Vineyards are harvested by hand and then sorted into small lugs. The lugs are then brought to the winery crush pad for processing. Our state of the art Europress by Scharfenberger is one of the highest quality presses available. The press features multiple computerized pressing cycles specifically designed for different styles of wine such as a very long and delicate press cycle for sparkling wines that avoids crushing grape seeds which impart a distinct bitterness to the final wine.

All of our white wine production is hand sorted to remove leaves, raisins, and damaged grapes. After sorting the grapes are whole cluster pressed instead of crushed and destemmed, this causes less damage to the fruit and preserves the delicate flavors and aromas that the local Georgia fruit offers. Once pressed, the juice is gravity fed into one of the fermentation tanks located 14 feet below in the cellar. These steps ensure only the highest quality juice is used to produce our award winning wines.

Red wines are hand sorted as well, gently destemmed and gravity fed from the sorting table to one of the red wine open top fermenters located in the cellar below. When the tank is full, the must (mix of grapes and juice) is chilled to the appropriate temperature and prepared for fermentation. Once fermentation begins and the skins separate from the juice, we begin the Old World technique of punching the resulting caps down by hand with a stainless steel mallet.

We ferment approximately 3 tons of red wine fruit in each of our 800 gallon stainless steel tanks. The tanks ratio of height to width is specifically designed to allow us to punch the caps of the fermenting red grapes by hand, gently mixing the skins with the fermenting wine. This is done four times a day with additional pump-overs twice daily. These techniques allow us to extract exceptional color and flavors from the fruit. Once fermentation is over, the wine is racked off (transferred) to a settling tank and the remaining skins are gently pressed. The wine settles for a few days in a tank and then it is barreled down for aging in our cask room.

The wines at Wolf Mountain are more European in style than Californian. As a result, we use predominately French and Hungarian Oak Barrels for the aging of all our wines. The emphasis is on the rich fruit flavors our terroir offers and not on excessive oak flavor. Our philosophy is to blend our grape varieties to achieve more complexity, as is done throughout Europe, where the climate is similar to the North Georgia Mountains.

Sparkling Wines

Wolf Mountain Vineyards produces three types of sparkling wines using the French-style Méthode Champenoise. This multistep process, developed in France's Champagne region, puts the still wine through a second fermentation in the bottle.