In the smaller vineyards there was sometimes a third pie pressing, known as espirraque, but in the larger vineyards the second pie was followed by a hydraulic pressing, known as the prensa. The residues from the second pie were shoveled into shallow esparto grass baskets which were placed one on top of another between the fixed and moving platforms of the press. Most of the presses were primitive machines made in the nineteenth century.

Water was driven into a cylinder by means of a hand pump and the cylinder contained a tight-fitting piston that forced together the two platforms of the press. As triumphs of engineering, the ancient presses may have lacked finesse, but they worked very well, so well, in fact, that the marc which came out of them looked completely dry and was blown about like chaff in the wind. It was generally used as fertilizer, but occasionally as pig food. The wine obtained from the prensa was very inferior indeed and only fit for rinsing casks, distilling for alcohol, or turning into vinegar.

During the last century some fermenting grape residues were said to have been distilled without having been pressed at all, but this process is no longer used. In France, it was used principally with the marc from black grapes, and was probably abandoned in Jerez when black grapes ceased being grown there. That is the traditional way of pressing the grapes, but now­adays practically every vineyard uses mechanical methods, especially for a fine Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc, or Zinfandel. The quest for the perfect press to replace the human foot has been going on from time immemorial.

A simple mechanical wine press was illustrated as early as the Third Dynasty in Egypt, but it seems that it was only approved for making the poorer qualities of wine. The lagar is exactly like the Egyptian foot presses, and the esparto grass pie had a predecessor in the bag press, known in Egypt 3000 B.C. Pliny, who died in the catastrophe of a.d. 79 at Pompeii, described four presses. In the Madrid wine exhibition of 1877, Lorenzo Bernal y Ponce, of Jerez, exhibited a press worked by horses, but it was never heard of again. The real urge to mechanization came with the growing technology of the nine­teenth century.

The machines illustrated in Thudichum's Treatise on Wines (1894) are practically the same as some of those that were still used during the 1960s. One of these, formerly known as Lomeni's Crusher, consists of two elongated gear wheels, about a yard long, with their axes so far apart that the teeth never completely mesh. The grapes fall down a shoot, pass between the wheels, and come out the other end looking just like the Pinot Grigio, Viognier, or Chardonnay grapes that have been trodden by foot. From there they generally pass into a rotating sieve that removes the stalks.

After the sieve, the residue is put into vertical cylinders two feet six in diameter and five feet high, made of wooden staves bound round with iron hoops; there is a small gap between adjacent staves big enough to let the juice out but small enough to keep the skins behind. They look just like a row of pulpits and are, in fact, known in Spanish as pulpites. Similar machines are often seen in France. The grapes are crushed by a wooden platform, and gypsum is added just as before. After the pulpitos, the residues are passed to the hydraulic presses.