The practice of foot-stomping grapes to make wine is seen by many in the modern wine industry as a romantic anachronism, an I Love Lucy! parody without much contemporary relevance. But thankfully, the opposite is true: As a growing number of boutique winemakers realize that traditional practices often lead to better wines, feet are stomping in more and more cellars each year.
Few do so with such thoroughness as the folks at Melville Winery in the Sta. Rita Hills, where second-generation vintner Chad Melville puts every single lot of red wine through about a week of foot-stomping prior to fermentation. During peak harvest, that can mean 30 1.5-ton vessels requiring 15 minutes of daily work each — once fermented, aged, and bottled, those trodden pinot noir and syrah grapes amount to about 8,000 cases of finished wine.
“We put on a parka and our rubber boots, and we jump in there,” said Melville, admitting people always mention that Lucy episode when they hear. “It’s like doing a StairMaster for an hour. You’re sweating. It’s work. We don’t just throw grapes at each other and giggle.”