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WINEMAKING TECHNICAL SPOTLIGHT 64 WINES&VINES February 2016 equipped with nothing but the best winemaking equipment and features nearly 18,000 square feet of caves dug into the base of Spring Mountain. Stacia (stay-sha) and Edwin both have backgrounds in science and engineering. Edwin Williams is a former engineer with jet en- gine producer Pratt & Whitney, worked at the Draper Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and founded his own data filtering and naviga- tion firm. While visiting the soft- ware company Object Design he met Stacia, who was working there as a software engineer. The couple had an interest in wine and winemaking, and after marrying in 2003 they moved to California so Stacia Williams could study winemaking at Cali- fornia State University, Fresno. The pair settled on the St. Helena property after Williams gradu- ated, and the name of the winery means "friends" in Scottish Gaelic. While attending Fresno State, Stacia Williams met Cody Stacey, who also had an engineering back- ground and for a time worked at the other leading jet engine pro- ducer, Williams International. Stacey and Stacia became friends while at Fresno, and the two stayed in touch after Stacey graduated and became an assis- tant winemaker at Bronco Wine Co. in Ceres, Calif. After nearly a year at Bronco, Stacey decided large-volume wine production wasn't a good match for him and left for a harvest in New Zealand. When he returned to the United States, Stacia Williams, who over- sees winemaking at Cairdean, hired Stacey as associate wine- maker in charge of day-to-day operations. Stacey also helped in the design phase of the winery. "We had a goal for a semi- automated facility for cost savings but also for winemaking tools," he told Wines & Vines while on a tour of the winery in November 2015. The crush pad is equipped to be run by one person. Almost all of the cellar operations can be moni- tored and managed remotely using the VinWizard computer system created by Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Wine Technology America. The cave includes an insulated room that can be warmed or chilled as needed, and its huge main chamber can accom- modate hundreds of barrels. Sta- cey designed the winery lab with the help of laboratory consultants VWR International in Brisbane, Calif., and jokes that it makes the staff at ETS jealous. "The more information you have, you can empower yourself," Stacey said. In addition to investing in the latest technology, the owners' other guiding design principle was that the winery would be laid out for the most efficient use of labor and resources. Stacey said the typical crush pad setup for red wine grape va- rieties entails a forklift driver pick- ing up a half-ton MacroBin and dumping it into a dosing hopper that steadily dispenses grapes onto a Milani sorting table that leads to a Scharfenberger incline belt conveyor. After dumping the bin, the forklift driver drops it in a bin washer from Tom Beard Co. that reuses the last rinse water from a wash cycle for the first rinse of the next bin. The inclined conveyor empties to a Bucher Vaslin Oscillys destem- mer, and destemmed berries fall onto a Milani shaker table for fur- ther sorting before getting col- lected in bins and dumped into open-top tanks or sent to closed- top tanks via an Enoveneta Mohno Twelve of the winery's fermentation tanks are equipped with pumps to run pumpovers that are managed by a VinWizard winemaking program, which also controls the winery's glycol system for heating and cooling tanks.