Winemaking
Wines That Express Terroir
At Hartford Family Winery, we honor traditional, artisan winemaking techniques to produce luscious wines that fully express the individual terroir of our vineyards. Guided by the expert hand of Winemaker Jeff Stewart, every bottle reflects a commitment to character, precision, and sense of place.
While every wine begins in the vineyard, it's the choices we make in the cellar that amplify the unique character of each block, vine, and clone. We believe in minimal intervention, allowing the personality of the vineyard and vintage to take the lead at every step, from the crush pad to the fermenter and from barrel to bottle.
Honoring Traditional
Winemaking Techniques
copy.jpg)
Making Chardonnay
Chardonnay is hand sorted, whole-cluster pressed and undergoes 100% barrel and malolactic fermentation. Batonage, or stirring of lees (spent yeast cells), is performed as warranted to build texture in the Chardonnay. Typically, all wines undergo native yeast and malolactic fermentations – just like our distinctive Pinot Noirs and Old Vine Zinfandels.
Destemmed, Not Crushed & Cold Soaks
Red varietals are partially de-stemmed but not crushed, leaving about 75% whole berries in the juice delivered to stainless steel open-top fermenters. Occasionally, small lots of Pinot Noir are whole-cluster fermented. Before fermentation, the whole berries and juice are cold-soaked in chilled tanks for nearly five days to extract delicate flavors and softer tannins.
Native Yeasts
After the Pinot Noir and Zinfandel cold soak, the cooling jackets are turned off and the grape juice is allowed to warm and begin fermentation, utilizing primarily native yeasts for both primary and secondary malolactic fermentation. We believe the yeast native to and ambient in each vineyard brings a signature of that site yielding wines of greater character and distinction.
Open Top Fermentation
For maximum color and flavor extraction, shallow, wide fermenters are used to facilitate the mixing (punching down) of the skins to make our red wines. During fermentation, red grapes are punched down in small open-top fermenters and pressed off after taste evaluation — usually at or close to dryness.
French Oak, Minimal Handling, Unfined and Unfiltered
Only tightly grained French oak barrels are used to age all of the wines. Wines are aged from 11 to 15 months. New French oak percentages generally range from 30% up to 100%. We believe in minimal handling of our wines - after going to barrel, wines are usually racked only once before bottling. We also do not fine or filter most of our wines in order to preserve the mouth-filling flavors and textures in our wine.
.png)
