AFS Celebrates 10th Anniversary with Wine-Making Event

We thought, “What better way for AFS to toast our tenth anniversary than with a big wine-making event?” So, we invited a group of clients and colleagues to join us at Bacchus Winemaking Club in Toms River, NJ, where we completed the first and
second steps in creating our custom, hand-crafted red wine.

Together, our AFS community crushed a large box of Petit Syrah (60% of the blend) and 10 crates each of Cabernet Sauvignon (20%) and Sangiovese (20%) to create our special blend — for approximately 750 pounds of grapes. That’s a lotta grapes! We formed an assembly line and moved the crates of grapes into the crusher, which quickly lived up to its name. From there, the juice and skins were pumped into a big plastic vat. We added small, but vital, amounts of sultes and yeast to get the fermentation process bubbling. Along the way, the terric sta at Bacchus helped explain the entire process and answered lots of thoughtful questions.

We left the juice mixture to ferment for seven days. During the fermentation process, the juice sank to the bottom and a solid cap of grape skins and pulp rose to the top. The cap was manually “punched down” three times each day to extract the most avor. After a week of fermenting, the mixture was ready for pressing and transfer to an oak barrel. Gravity drew out the juice that had sank to the bottom of the vat. The remaining mixture was scooped into a wine press with buckets, where an interior bladder released the remaining juice. It was amazing to see how much juice the press extracted. These juices joined the others already in the barrel. There, they’ll age until the summer of 2014, when we’ll bottle our custom-crafted Petit Syrah blend.