Copyright 2002 Brehm Vineyards

"Why are my hands stained after pressing?"

Ever wonder why your hands are so cracked and stained after pressing your red grapes?

The following is an article from The Oakstone News, volume V, No. 5 - November 2001.

The Oakstone News is a publication put out by Oakstone Winery. Oakstone Winery and De Cascabel Vineyards are owned by John Smith of Fair Play, California. Our El Dorado Cabernet Sauvignon comes from the De Cascabel Vineyards.

" Hands of the Winemaker

As the photo of Craig's hands shows, for about two months each year, a winemaker wears a badge of his profession that is hard to miss. The cause is two-fold, and even has a little interesting chemistry associated with it. The first part, which is felt as much as seen, is caused by the tannins in wine. The name tannin comes from the well-known ability of these substances to 'tan' leather, and they do it by reacting with the proteins in the hide (the same reaction that removes tannins from wine during egg-white fining) to cause a mechanical strengthening of the structure called 'cross-linking.' When your hands are immersed in grapes and wine many times a day, the same reaction occurs on your skin, concentrating on the surface layers of dead cells known as the 'stratum corneum.' The result is a hardening and coarsening of the skin, and after a week or two, the surfaces become rough, dry and cracked.

While the pigments in grapes (especially petite sirah) can cause intense purple stains on the skin, this effect wears off rather quickly. But if you combine the grape pigments with iron (from hydraulic control levers, ratchet handles, pitchforks or the many other elegant implements of crush), the stain from the interaction of iron with the phenolic pigments is much more tenacious, and deposits primarily on the dead and cross-linked skin that the tannins have already attacked. This black, rather than purple, stain stays around for many days until the skin gradually wears away. What does a winemaker do if he has to appear in polite society where blackened hands would be a faux pas? A solution of citric acid (or fresh lemon juice) will remove a good deal of it by forming a stronger complex with the iron, but will reveal in excruciating detail the location of all the cuts, cracks and splits that don't heal up after harvest. It requires a real value judgment, to determine if your cousin's wedding is really worth the pain involved in making yourself temporarily acceptable to polite society. Craig insists that the only time it really bothers him is towards the end of crush, when he can no longer twist the cap off a beer bottle."