Our Winery

Here at Shelburne Vineyard we want our grapes, juice and wine to be treated well. That’s why we use high quality stainless steel equipment and tanks, as well as oak cooperage. When our grapes hit the crush pad, they go through an Italian made  adjustable crusher-destemmer manufactured by Cima, to separate the berries from the grape stems.

For white wine, the lightly crushed grapes, skins and seeds  (called “must”) is transported via a 3 inch screw pump  to the  computer controlled, sixteen hectoliter pneumatic press manufactured in Slovenia by the  SK Group. We then place the juice into one of our temperature controlled stainless steel tanks for fermentation. Our tanks range in size from 300L to 8000L and are temperature controlled by a glycol chilling system.   We control fermentation temperature to 60 to 70 F. to preserve the fruitiness of the grape.  After fermentation is complete, the wine remains in stainless tanks for aging.

Red grapes are treated differently.  After the crush-destemming operation the berries (skins, seeds and pulp) are pumped into stainless steel tanks for fermentation.  During fermentation tannins and color are extracted from the skins of the grapes.  We allow fermentation temperature to go to 85 or 90 degrees to insure full color extraction from the skins.  The must then goes to the press where the solids (skins and seed) are finally separated from the new wine.  The wine is then aged in classic 225L barrels crafted from either French, Eastern European, or American oak.

During cellar operations, wine is transferred using one of our two remote controlled impeller pumps, a 1.5 inch Liverani (used for pumping juice and wine) or 2.5 inch EnoItalia  (used for pumping “must” as well as wine).  Prior to bottling our white wines are filtered in two stages with our Italian-made Della Toffola plate and frame filter and El Nova cartridge filter.

When the wine is ready and it is time for bottling, we use a GAI eight-spout automatic filler-corker monoblock that feeds an OMB monoblock for capsule placement and pressure-sensitive labeling to bring you the very finest in Vermont wines.