Liquid Architecture, Session One

Greg introduces us to the Carmenere and Syrah grapes

For those of you who know us, this won’t be a surprise. If you aren’t familiar with us, this is a great intro to exactly who we are at DLA.

We take the idea of lifelong learning to heart. When my colleagues learned that I was taking wine-making classes, their interest was piqued. It was the perfect intersection of my love of learning and wine. Everyone was excited to hear about what was essentially a months-long STEM project. Not only was it a big science project, it involved all the C’s – creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. As I shared the results of my successful experiment at the office over the holidays, inspiration hit! Let’s all participate and share the results with our friends and clients.

Greg explaining the chemical process the wine will undergo
Carrie Matlock, Wendy Covich, & Lydia Lutzow loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Gary Stanley
Ed Wright loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed

Our creative and fun-loving group has just begun the process of making a barrel of wine. If the experiment goes well, we’ll share it with our clients and friends this holiday season.

This is all happening at this awesome place I found for my own classes called Bev Art, on the South side of Chicago. Our process started last week because grapes are currently being harvested in the Southern Hemisphere. Specifically, Chile.

After a classroom introduction, our first of four sessions was to crush and destem the grapes. 18 of us showed up in bare feet. No, we didn’t! I’m kidding of course! This is a professional operation and we used a destemming machine that crushed the grapes and pumped them into a large container. We crushed 10 cases of Syrah and 20 of Carmenere.

This is called a field blend as we mixed them all together at the time of the crush. Currently, we are still waiting for the Cabernet grapes to ship, that varietal will round off our Chilean blend.  Once all the grapes were crushed and stems removed, we added sulfites to eliminate any bacteria that might be present. The last step of the evening was to impregnate the crushed grape juice slurry with yeast in order to begin the fermentation process.

We had an awesome time and sampled a lot of wine that the owner Greg had made. Things got a little fuzzy after Greg broke out the honey mead samples, but that is another story. Stay tuned for our next session, pressing the grapes.

Lydia Lutzow loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Carrie Matlock & Brian Scully loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Carrie Matlock, Gary Stanley, & Lydia Lutzow loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Dwain Lutzow capturing the grapes in the barrel
Carrie Matlock and Greg prep the refractometer to check the sugar content
Hilarion Amaro loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Peter Pontarelli loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Steve Wright loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Checking the sugar content with a refractometer (Dwain Lutzow)
Steve Wright loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Grape destemming assembly line
Ilda Shallo
Carrie Matlock & Dwain Lutzow
Steve Wright
Greg & Brian Pencak destemming and crushing grapes
Checking the sugar content with a refractometer (Ed Wright)
Brian Scully loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Checking the sugar content with a refractometer (Steve Wright, Peter Pontarelli, Lydia Lutzow, Ilir Shallo)
Grape destemming assembly line
Ed Wright
Hilarion Amaro loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed
Wendy Covich & Lydia Lutzow loading grapes to be destemmed and crushed