The majority of wine in Peru is made in the Ica province, which is a desert. On average this area receives less than 5mm of rain per year. So where do they get the water from? They built a canal. This way, the water from the mountains runs down into Ica.
There are some large wineries in Ica that use modern technology. Tacama would be one of these. Tacama is actually the oldest winery in America. It was started by the Spanish as they did not want to continue importing communion wine from Europe (that’s their story and they are sticking with it).
However, there are also a lot of smaller vineyards that use manual labour for everything.
Once they harvest, the grapes go into the front of this and people still use their feet to crush them. After that it goes into a press, which is turned by hand on a corkscrew. Obviously these are small wineries, but I still think it’s pretty cool to see them continuing the old traditions.
Pisco is a distilled spirit made from grapes. First they get the juice out if the grapes and then they heat it. It boils and the steam rises. The steam us forced through a copper tube and cooled.
This bath would be full of cold water. When they first extract it they get 98% alcohol which I’m told us bad for you 🙂 They sell that to pharmacies as rubbing alcohol. After that they get Pisco (35% – 45%), after that they get a much lower product that they use to feed livestock.
The casks here are used instead of barrels for the wine.
I took a wine “tour”. It was actually a taxi driving me between wineries. The actual wineries did the tour. I found it quite interesting. Obviously they let you sample the wine and Pisco.