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90 WINES&VINES November 2016 WINEMAKING Promote your wines to leading Zinfandel enthusiasts and extend your winery's relationship in the market. Join Us! We are champions of Zinfandel— America's Heritage Wine Become part of our proud legacy zinfandel.org • 530-274-4900 Zinfandel Advocates & Producers is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. ZAP is dedicated to advancing public knowledge of and appreciation for American Zinfandel and its unique place in our culture and history. You know how good your Zinfandel is... SAVES OPEN WINE FROM OXIDATION "KEEPS WINE FRESH " rier Preventing Wine Oxidation 100% PRODUCT GUARANTEE www.VineyardFresh.com Gary@VineyardFresh.com TASTING ROOM MUST HAVE LEARN MORE system that shows many graphical ways to look at the sample data. The flagship instrument for Astoria-Pacific is their Astoria, followed by their Astoria 2. These are samplers that run 200-plus tests per hour. Both Randox and Megazyme have larger instruments than the Monza and MegaQuant Wave, and those should also be evaluated when making a decision on this level of equip- ment purchase. There is, however, one interesting factor at play here. There is no question that with a five-figure cost for instruments that can handle hundreds of samples per hour, there is a market opportunity for companies with an instrument that can handle 30 to 100 tests per hour at a lower price. Both Megazyme and Astoria-Pa- cific now supply the ChemWell-T auto-analyzer manufactured by Awareness Technology. The ChemWell-T auto-analyzer is more affordable and comes with open-system software. From Megazyme, optimized test settings are avail- able for many of the company's test kits. These instruments use a much-reduced assay volume compared the manual assay formats (about 10 times less) and therefore the cost per test is reduced accordingly. It should be noted that the reagents of many of the Megazyme test kits can be easily prepared as two or three reagent assays for use with any auto-analyzer. Summary The wine laboratory is as important to the success of a winery as any other element in the process of setting up that winery. Historically, wineries have often decided to do basic tests including total acidity, SO 2 and pH while send- ing out for tests that are more technologically challenging. For those simple tests, hydrome- ters, a refractometer and basic labware are the essential equipment. Whether these functions are performed using wet chemistry or some of the simpler laboratory instruments, the cost of these basics will be $2,000 to $3,000 to perform the four or five most basic tests a winery needs virtually every day. A winery also should factor in the time that each test takes to run when calculat- ing lab expenses. Adding a MegaQuant Wave, its associated pipets and other lab gear adds some costs but removes others. The net comes down to a total cost of about $5,000. The costs of the test kits are considered to be consumables. The best news is the significant increase in the types of analytes the winery can add as "in-house" tests and procedures. A winery will be able to mea- sure primary amino nitrogen, ammonia, L- lactic acid, L-malic acid, acetic acid, glucose, fructose, ethanol, acetaldehyde, ascorbic acid and citric acid. Finally, in speaking with Megazyme, I learned that they have the ability to add two additional filters to their unit at a marginal cost increase. The company is testing the ability to add filters for measuring hue, color intensity and density of wines using the MegaQuant Wave instrument. If there are enough requests from wineries, the 420 nm and 520 nm filters could be included with the instrument instead of the other normal enzymatic filters. This would give the instrument the ability to run wine color balance equations, virtually eliminat- ing any need for a spectrometer and possibly eliminating the need for a nephelometer that is used in determining heat stability. Richard Carey, Ph.D., is owner and wine consultant at Tamanend Wine Consulting in Lancaster, Pa. He has written numerous articles about new technologies for the grape and wine industry for Wine East and Wines & Vines. A winery should factor in the time that each test takes to run when calculating lab expenses. HoytShepston_Monthly09 10/31/08 4:44 PM