Understanding Wine Making Process: An In- Depth Look at Essential Equipment
Since pretty much everyone loves a good glass of wine, a lot of you might be making wine at home as well. While you can still get away with small mistakes while making wine at home, things are much different when making wine on an industrial scale. Because if you are running a large-scale distillery, then following and understanding the wine making process explained in this guide is highly crucial. More importantly, you also need to use the right wine making equipment if you want to get the best results for wine making.
Understanding the Wine Making Process
Before choosing the right equipment for your winery, it is quite crucial to know the correct wine making methods. While different wines may have slightly different steps, you need to know the following 7 steps to understand the wine making process:
Harvesting
The complete wine making process starts from harvesting the grapes needed to make wine. This is either done by hand or using modern machines to save a lot of time.
De-stemming
After the grapes have been harvested, all bad-quality grapes are rejected. All of the grapes that are approved are then cleaned and de-stemmed so only the grape itself is used for making wine.
Crushing
Once the grapes are ready for wine making, the process starts by crushing all the grapes using machines that grind and mix the grapes. This essentially creates a grape juice which will be then used for making wine.
Fermentation or Maceration
Once you have a wine making mixture, it is then fermented by adding yeast. By adding yeast and leaving it for a month, the yeast breaks down the sugars from the grapes to create alcohol in the wine.
Malolactic Fermentation
After the fermentation, further processes are applied that reduce the acid flavor and start the aging process. During this process, the wine develops all of its flavors and characteristics.
Clarification
It is highly important to clarify the wine to remove all impurities. It is done by adding egg whites, clay, or other clarification compounds that make all of the solids settle down at the bottom.
Bottling
Once all of these processes are completed and the wine has been aged up to a certain period, it can then be bottled up to be sold in the market or for your own consumption.
Essential Equipment for Wine Making
After understanding the wine making process, you need to make sure that you are pairing this wine making process with the right wine making equipment as well. And while different wine distilleries may use slightly different equipment, some of the common things used for wine making include:
Cartridge Filters - Housing
Just per the name, this is a tubular filter that removes all unwanted particles and impurities from your wine. Being shaped in the shape of a cartridge, installing and using these is quite easy.
Conveyor Belts
Similar to any other industry, the wine making industry also relies on conveyor belts that are used in multiple places throughout the wine making process for automation.
Crossflow Filters with Ceramic
While the cartridge filter is responsible for removing larger impurities, this crossflow filter uses membranes for removing any smaller impurities in your wine.
Ecoflot Batch Flotators
By temporarily adding air to the wine, ecoflot batch flotators are able to separate the wine liquid and any solids present in it that settle down on the bottom.
Grape Processing Equipment
This type of equipment can be anything that is used to handle the grapes during the wine making process. It can include things like the harvester, cleaners, destemmers, and others.
Industrial Plate Filter Press
With this type of filter, a high pressure is used to separate solids and liquids in the wine to remove any leftover impurities further.
NDC Crusher Destemmer
Such kind of destemmers are quite common in wine making processes as they are used to remove the stems of grapes, which is highly important for making wine.
Discharged Kieselgur Filters
This is a special type of filter that uses diatomaceous earth or kieselguhr as its filtration material. With this type of filter, you are able to get the highest quality wine.
Rotary Vacuum Filters
As you can guess by the name, a rotary vacuum filter uses rotation and then the vacuum created due to centrifugal forces helps filter the wine.
CFK-N Crossflow Filters
If you are looking for industrial-grade filters, then CFK-N cross-flow filters can be a great option as they use ceramic membranes to filter. These types of filters can help you filter both clarified and unclarified wines.
Benefits of using Advanced Equipment
As stated earlier, you can even make wine right at your home by simply understanding the wine-making process required for it. In that case, you might be wondering about the whole point of using industrial wine making equipment.
For starters, adding crossflow filters will definitely improve the quality of your wine by removing impurities. And if you further add things like a rotary vacuum filter, you can even make this filtration process much faster.
Apart from filtration, other wine making equipment like conveyor belts and batch floaters help in the automation of the whole wine making process.
In short, by understanding the wine making process and using the corresponding wine making equipment, you will be able to easily make your wine making process more efficient while making better quality wine at the same time.
Choosing the Right Equipment for your Winery
Now we have explained how understanding the wine making process and using the correct wine-making process is highly beneficial; you would also want to get wine making equipment. In that case, make sure to consider the following factors for getting wine making equipment:
Whenever you are considering such factors for getting wine making equipment, make sure to keep your long-term goals in mind. This way, even if you are spending extra for high end equipment, you will still get a better value for money in the long run.
