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WINEMAKING Novel press designs SIPREM has long been the world's most inventive wine press manufacturer. I first encountered them 30 years ago with a tank press that employed water instead of compressed air—not exactly a good idea, but you had to admire their penchant for outside-the- box thinking. This year they have two interesting offerings that appear to have some real practical value. If you are on a rampage to exclude oxygen, the SottoVuoto Vacuum Tank Press is as ingenious as it gets. Prior to axial feeding, the press is first purged with CO2 gas that may be captured from crushing process and remove field heat. Alternatively, a vacuum assist enables axial loading of whole clusters. SIPREM touts sensory studies at the Universities of Ancona and Udine showing enhanced aroma, body and richness of both whites and reds. The system can hardly be said to honor the KISS principle, and fermentation tanks and recycled through a blimp-like reservoir above the tank. Rather than using compressed air to drive the membrane, a high vacuum is pulled on the juice side, making it physically impossible to press with more than one bar. For an even more reductive process, grapes can be fed to the crusher with an Alcryo100 device that generates CO2 snow to blanket the through a series of five pressing chambers of increasing pressures controllable by the operator, discharging dry pomace continuously. CIP is automatically controlled. Forty to 50 feet in length, it's hardly the small footprint of a screw press. On the other hand, the SIPREM system (available in 12 to 40 tons per hour sizes) does not require ice or press aids to get started, and it is more tolerant of stop-and-start operation than other continuous systems. skeptics will point to the unreliability of vacuum systems. Oxygen isn't always a bad thing, and follow-up treatments such as oxygen dosing might be required to avoid problems with pinking and reduction in whites as well as color-fixing in reds. The problem with tank presses is that they are a batch process. Screw presses, for all their shortcomings, are a dream in terms of process flow. Now SIPREM gives us the best of both worlds with the Continuous Membrane Press, surely the first of its kind. During rotation, between pressing cycles, an internal helix moves pomace ScottLabs_Dec10.qxp 10/21/10 10:39 AM Page 1 New filter technology TMCI Padovan of Vittorio Veneto, Italy, has completely rethought cross-flow filtration and come up with Dynamos, a simple, robust, low-energy, low-labor, continuous system for turning press wine into clear juice and toothpaste without the use of filter aids. Inside a sealed chamber fed by a peristaltic pump rotating at 250 rpm, disk-shaped polymer 0.1μ membranes clean themselves by their own rotation, assisted by surface scraping rather than fluid flow. Internal spiral channels direct filtrate to a central collection tube until flow approaches zero, triggering discharge of 80%-90% solids, followed by back flush with your choice of gas or filtrate. The main concern with the Dynamos system is capital expense. A $50,000 machine outputs 15 gallons per hour (gph), and for 300gph you're looking at $350,000. Still, with today's Cabernet prices, a properly scaled system could pay for itself in a single vintage. Della Toffolla has fine-tuned conventional cross flow. Of the many formats available, they have fixed on the advantages of ceramics for handling up to 2% solids (1,000 NTUs). Once plagued with fragility problems, ceramic materials are now much more robust. The near invulnerability of ceramics to heat and chemical abuse make them easy to clean and sterilize, tolerating up to 80°C and pH levels from 1 to 13. Their inert surface lacks zeta potential (charge) and thus WinesandVinesFeb2012_BWquarterpagead.pdf 1 1/8/12 7:50 PM TANKNET® THERMOSTATS operate stand-alone and network with NO NEW WIRES at the tank. C M Y CM MY CY CMY K 707 938-1300 WWW.ACROLON.COM 62 Wines & Vines FeBRUARY 2012 ®