The evolution of barrel management technology
Traditional processes for oak cleaning and wine barrel racking have long frustrated winemakers. Managing director of Vitis & Winemakers, Paul Baggio, explains how barrel management systems have now evolved to provide expanded functionalities.
The maturation of wine has long been associated with aspirations of improving wine quality, related to both red wine and high-end white wine vini cation. With a focus on improving Australia’s and New Zealand’s wine quality, and as styles evolve and new wine markets are adopted, there’s been increasing interest from prestige winemakers in managing what is one of their most costly inventories, their oak barrels.
With the management of oak casks comes a whole impost related to occupational health and safety, including the repetitive movement of barrels which involves the lifting and joggling of heavy timber across metal racks often within confined spaces. There are also factors to consider related to inert gasses being stored in warehouses, as well as hot steam pressure cleaning, chemical cleaning, and concerns over wine losses and barrel racking seismic issues. All these have pushed barrel management systems, and all matters related to the automation of barrel inventories, to the top of the capital procurement shopping list for many winemakers.
Barrel management system outside of cleaning.
Issues with traditional barrel management
The traditional processes for oak cleaning and wine barrel racking have long frustrated winemakers. Plagued with significant wine losses, manual handling is currently the predominant way to manoeuvre oak barrels in racks, even if forklifts are used to transport these within the winery. But too often, this means wine stock is literally being flushed down the drain.
Most managers would agree that the current oak barrel cleaning process remains the most crudely-managed aspect of the modern winery. Barrels are literally lined up back-to-back along winery pads, and cellar hands figuratively breaking their backs rotating them to get the barrel holes positioned southwards so that a rudimentary trolley with a high-pressure cleaning head can be jostled into position. High-pressure hot water cleaning pumps, with no real scientific basis, the control the boiling water that’s repeatedly pumped into the oak cask.
A major issue is that results are often not consistently repeated in what is usually very valuable oak. This means that often barrels are not sufficiently cleaned during this process, or worse still, end up being harshly stripped.
Furthermore, challenges have been growing due to a lack of available cellar hand staff during off-season when most oak management needs to take place.
The lack of control that occurs with existing manual barrel emptying and cleaning systems can also cause added problems related to wastewater, as well as the impact on the life cycle of new oak cask inventories from over pressure cleaning.
Technology improving barrel management
New oak barrels have never been a low- cost item for winemakers to purchase and their cost, combined with the freight and logistics involved in shipping them are all escalating.
The technologies related to barrel cleaning has certainly changed over the years. The trusted barrel cradle and the often single-barrel high pressure cleaning head, mechanically driven by high pressure pumps and circular cleaning heads, is what most cellar hands would be familiar with. Probably less familiar are the extensive studies surrounding what degree of pressure should be exerted. The stripping of tartrate layers today can be performed to a high science. Pressure trans-juicers on pumps can be utilised to apply a precision removal of layers while not stripping valuable oak.
Combinations of low-pressure and high-pressure cleans are part of the technologies that evolved more than 10 years ago on the earliest robotic systems that we, at Vitis & Winemakers, developed at Yalumba Wine Estates. The systems deployed on the latest fully- automatic, tailored systems installed in Barossa, Marlborough and Hawke’s Bay wineries offer a multitude of recipe-controlled cleaning and steam sterilisation processes.
The overall issues that have culminated in recent times, such as the lack of cellar staff, are highlighting long-held problems related to the scheduling of finished wines and how bottling schedules should occur within larger winery operations. The labour intensity of the current process – which for many wineries with a 10,000 tonne crush capacity, or greater, would require at least six operators – could be reduced to a single operator and fork driver. Being able to schedule barrels for top up, oak and SO2 additions, bâtonnage processes or simply racking and change overs on demand, all add to what’s currently driving winemakers to seek out the significant advantages of downstreaming management processes such as wine blending and packaging that our fully automated barrel handling systems offer.
Rather than needing to schedule a whole labour pool of cellar hands to physically turn and manually clean oak casks, oak requirements can instead be managed on demand in the same way that a bottling line is utilised.
Barrel cleaning systems have evolved from single dual carriage cleaning systems (linear systems that can rack and return wines and provide cleaning functionality), through to state-of-the-art fully robotically- driven systems that offer a complete range of barrel process handling, such as SO2 dosing, top up, bâtonnage handling right through to external and internal barrel cleaning, sterilisation and/or additive additions. The ability to program in recipe control, such as occurs with bottling lines, is a game changer for oak barrel management.
Features of the latest barrel handling systems
The functionality that can now be provided with our barrel management systems is extensive. Features and processes include SO2 post wash gas filling, bâtonnage management, wine top up function with CO2 gas injection and barrel tartrate cleaning. The latter involves barrel emptying, barrel hot water wash cleaning and having wine refilled with CO2 gas injection prior to refilling. Other options involve additive additions and the mixing of additives such as tannins and/ or gums, as well as the management of leaking or damaged barrels.
Generally, barrels are able to be emptied, cleaned, washed inside and out with controlled pressure and temperature. Also, options are available related to barrel coding, which enables tracking right through to the planned retirement of oak for sale or storage.
A feature of the technology is a robot claw that can move along an ‘x/y axis’ as opposed to being restricted to single dimensional linear movement (this is shown in the accompanying photos).
This is advanced technology that has emanated from the motor vehicle industry and the experiences learned with robotic manufacturing.
For more information on barrel management equipment and technology in Australia and New Zealand, please contact Paul Baggio at Vitis & Winemakers via email: PaulB@vitiswinemakers.com
*This article first appeared in Grapegrower & Winemaker Magazine - January 2022