Destemming : send your photos!

[PaulineA]

Hello everyone
This is quite a strange request I'm posting here. I'm a French student in Enology (nothing fancy, just enough to be independent in my choices and actions) and I hope to take on my mum's vineyard when my degree is done. For this degree, I have to present an experiment and I chose to work on destemming. We split one ton of grapes and split it in halves : one fermenting with its stems (semi- carbonic maceration) and the other without. Of course, I took plenty of pictures but unfortunately I lost most of them in a computer issue.
So today, I'm looking for a picture of stems after going through the destemmer: one damaged and one intact. Obviously, the wines are finished here so I can't do that in France but I thought that I might find some solidarity on the other side of the planet. So I don't how far you guys are into the harvest but if a few people were so nice as to send me two pics of stems after they destemmed their harvest, that would be super nice and allow me to be more explicit about my experiment.
Also, if you want to share why you keep stems or not, I would be very glad to hear you!
Many thanks
Pauline

 

[cmason1957]

You might get some of the folks from the Southern side of the world to help you out with pictures, in the Nothern Hemisphere we harvest same time as France, more or less. It puzzles me why this is an either or kind of question, I run my grapes through a crusher/destemmer, but if some stems happen to make it through that, I just leave them. Generally I get maybe 5% of the stems get through and that's a number I am just guessing it, might be more or less. Point is, I don't make any extra effort to keep them out.

 

[NorCal]

I make wine using around 2 tons of grapes each year. All the grapes go through my destemmer (which was finished up in October, or else I would get some pictures for you). I destem to reduce the tannin/astringency of the resulting wine. Especially with the lower brix grapes (=<24), where I would be worried about pyrazine and the resulting vegetal flavors. I am less concerned about the inclusion of stems into my must that is higher brix (>=26), where the stems tend to be browner and I feel less likely to influence the must. Good luck with your research.

 

[Ajmassa]

Green or brown, using a crusher/destemmer gets rid of enough for it not to be a concern.
But I’m not following what it is exactly that you want. Pics of stems- “damaged and intact”? So you also want pics of the full cluster of grapes on the stem before being crushed?
I usually take pics of everything, and always accessible since they’re all on my phone.
I can post some for ya, but if anyone’s pics would work then I’m sure you could find much better pic options by googling. I’ll post some of what I’ve got though

 

[Ajmassa]

Here’s a bunch of different pics showing clusters, stems, destemming etc. Hopefully this helps

 

[Ajmassa]

This last pic I thought was interesting. Where I picked up my grapes last season I ventured over to the heavy equipment and saw they were grinding up all the stems.
Not sure if they repurpose somehow or just for space saving purposes, but interesting nonetheless.

 

[Rice_Guy]

Nice pictures.

 

[FTC Wines]

We de-stem too carefully by hand. Waste. A lot of time but think it goes to a good cause. Roy