What is “Cold-soaking” anyways?

There are a lot of buzzwords in the winemaking industry that flow in and out of fashion. You’ll hear them in tasting rooms, see them in wine critic tasting notes and even find them popping up on back labels every now and then. Let me know if some of these sound familiar? Minerality, natural wine, low-intervention, cold-soaked, wild ferments, gravity-flow… It can be helpful to understand these terms to improve your wine knowledge and ability to “take a wine apart” while you’re tasting it. Some of these words are controversial, some are winemaking philosophies and some are simple processes. This is about the buzzword “cold-soak”, also sometimes called “cold-maceration”.

Cold-soaking is a practice that only some winemakers choose to execute. It occurs after the fruit has been brought in from the vineyard. The destemmed and crushed fruit is put into a tank and the temperature is dropped to around 10˚C where it is held for a set amount of time. Both red and white grapes can benefit from this process.

What varieties do we cold-soak?

At Harwood, most of the varieties we work with go through the cold-soaking process with the exception of Chardonnay.

What is the benefit of cold-soaking?

For white varieties, a cold-soak allows more time for the juice to be in contact with the skins prior to pressing. In this time, it can pull more aromatics and aromatic pre-cursors from under the skins. Usually a cold-soak on a white variety is for a shorter period, anywhere from 6-24 hours on average. I like to cold-soak our Pinot Gris and Gewürztraminer varieties for about 24 hours.

A byproduct of the process is that it will pull some colour from the skins. Since Pinot Gris has a beautiful soft grayish-purple skin, it turns the juice a beautiful pink colour initially. The colour will dissipate throughout the aging process, however you will often see a slight pinkish hue to our Pinot Gris.

For reds grapes, the cold-soak is often a bit longer. For our Pinot Noir and St. Laurent grapes I like to cold-soak for about 5 days depending on the state of the fruit at picking. Cold-soaks on red grapes are beneficial as they provide more time on skins which, much the same as the whites, allow you to pull aromatics and aromatic pre-cursors.

With a cold-soak, it’s important to distinguish that this is a pre-fermentation process, so the medium is water based versus alcohol based. Molecules and enzymes have different solubility and efficacy in different mediums and I believe that having the grapes in an aqueous (water based) medium helps pull different molecules out and allow different beneficial enzymatic reactions to take place prior to fermentation. This process also helps pull additional anthocyanins (colour pigments) from the skins to deepen the colour of the finished wine.

So now you’re all caught up on the buzzword “cold-soaking” and although you can’t practice your new vocabulary at our winery right now, you are welcome to order online and see the difference it makes to our wines!