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April 2018 WINES&VINES 39 WINERY & VINEYARD EQUIPMENT berries and the other MOG as well—definitely an improvement in processing efficiency, and hopefully a minor improvement in wine quality." Isenhower added that next year he is hoping to replace his old destemmer with a new one to reduce the number of broken stem jacks and increase the number of whole berries headed for the fer- mentor. He said he's interested in machines that use a raking action rather than a cage with paddles. Jason Keever, director of pro- duction at his family's Keever Vineyards & Winery in the Napa Valley, said the winemaking team at the 2,000-case winery "abso- lutely love" the WECO optical sorter, which was purchased for the 2017 harvest. Since the win- ery was built in 2006, all sorting has been done by hand. Cellar crew and interns would dump FYB bins onto a shaker table that led to the destemmer, and six to eight temporary workers would per- form post-destemming sorting. "Over the past four harvests, we have had more and more difficulty getting as many sorters as we would have liked," Keever said. "In harvest 2016, I was lucky to get three people with 48 hours' notice to sort fruit. We were not willing to risk wine quality by letting more and more MOG find its way into tank, so we had to make a change." The change was investing in the new WECO machine that Keever said does an excellent job of sorting at a rate of about 2 tons per hour. "The limiting factor is how fast we can dump FYBs on our first sorting table," Keever said. "The WECO could easily do that and more, but I can only dump bins so fast." While the user interface was a bit daunting at first, Keever said a WECO technician helped him get the hang of it so he could get back to the work of harvest. "I don't have time for a steep learning curve," he said. "I was able to quickly dial the WECO in so that I was getting clean fruit in tank." Popular pick with Pinot producers For winemakers already in the market for a new destemmer, the Armbruster Rotovib, distributed in the United States by Scott Laboratories, continues to be a popular pick. Wheeler Farms winery in Napa Valley has a Bucher Vaslin Delta Oscyllis de- stemmer and Delta R1 Vistalys optical sorter.