Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/62516
Inquiring Winemaker TIM P A T TERSON All the Numbers You Need, and Then Some ly at harvest time, with untold batches of grapes showing up and needing numbers ASAP, testing can become more than try- ing. Sure, you can send everything out, but that costs a bundle, and you may have to wait a couple days for results. If only there was some machine that could do the job instead… Sure enough, there are machines that L can, apparently, do just that. Quite a num- ber of sophisticated, high-capacity, multi- purpose, automated analyzers are on the market—many of them initially developed for other food, beverage, environmental and clinical purposes and now adapted with new software to meet the testing needs of the wine industry. You can bet that any Truly Big Winery has one of these, or more likely several, and they play work- horse roles at service laboratories. But do they make any sense for small- and medium-sized wineries, producers of 10,000-40,000 cases? Are these wineries likely to have a spare $30,000-$50,000 to invest in a piece of equipment that doesn't process grapes and wine, but scrutinizes analytes and generates numbers instead? If they took the plunge, would they be get- ting their money's worth? And most of all, would they know what to do with all those numbers? Automated capacities For such an investment to make sense for less-than-mega-wineries, it would have to meet at least three criteria: 100 Wines & Vines nOVeMBeR 201 1 ab work isn't the most glam- orous aspect of winemaking. Winery staffers rarely wake up in the morning energized about the prospect of spending a day running malos. Especial- Highlights • More wineries are deciding whether to invest in high-end, automated testing equipment. • Several technology classes offer faster test runs, automated sampling and the ability run do several tests on multiple samples at once. • One caveat is that powerful lab equip- ment is only as good as the lab's quality- control program. line of equipment and the MetrOhm Titrino line, automated titration sys- tems primarily deployed to analyze pH and TA. Equipment in this category not only performs the titrations but dilutes samples automatically, de-gasses wine samples (removing CO2 that could throw thing wineries do over and over again; an example here is the FIAStar technology from FOSS. Others have the capacity to do multiple off results) and runs tests on large num- bers of samples at once. Flow analyzers, which inject the sample into a continuous flow of reagents, are frequently dedicated to measuring free and total SO2 , some- 1. Save staff time and trouble through higher capacity, better ease of use and reduction of human error; 2. Make sense economically, when all the costs of old and new testing systems are compared; 3. Produce results that are precise (that is, repeatable), accurate (that is, true) and actually useful to wine production. Lab equipment that promises to fill this bill comes in several flavors based on dif- fering underlying technologies and test methods. This column doesn't try to be a feature review or comparative evaluation, but a quick look at the relevant techno- logical categories is still useful. Some of the available equipment con- centrates on doing a few things well, over and over, reliably and in large quantities. This category includes the Sirius Vinotrate tests on one or more samples all at once. These automated analyzers—referred to as "segmented" or "discrete"—generally use well-established enzymatic techniques to produce chemical reactions, then read the final values using some form of spec- trophotometry to assess color as the mark- er of the results. Entries here include the Chemwell system distributed by Unitech, the Astoria-Pacific "Discrete" system (ba- sically the same machinery as the Chem- well, but with different software) and, at the highest end, the Konelab line of equip- ment from Thermoscientific. Chemwell, for example, offers a menu of 26 tests that can be run, including glucose, fructose, lactic acid, malic acid, tartaric acid, acetic acid, free and total sulfite, anthocyanins and total phenols. Newer (at least for the wine industry) and quite distinct wrinkles are systems utilizing Fourier Transform InfraRed Spectroscopy (FTIR), deciphering the chemical components of a wine sample through the infrared portion of the light spectrum, a different region from stan- dard spectrophotometers. This is an indi- rect, secondary method of measurement, which means the equipment needs care- ful calibration so that it "reads" the com- plexity of wine properly. The main player here is FOSS, with its high-end Winescan line and "entry-level" Oenofoss system priced around $30,000, comparable to the Chemwell. The Oenofoss can perform about a dozen tests on either juice or fin-