WINERY EQUIPMENT

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SHOWCASE
WINERY EQUIPMENT
SMART VITICULTURE
Scott Henry
with a twist
Blending efficiency
with quality
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
COVER STORY
P&L Specialties’ automated conveyance
system delivers high-volume efficiency and
gentle product handling. The conveyor
construction formed the belt surface into a
shallow U-shape that allows easy sorting
of machine-harvested red grapes. The
conveyor sorting surface is 36 inches wide
and 24 feet long. For hand sorting, the belt
can be slowed to 24 feet per minute (about
3 seconds per foot), and can be accessed
on both sides by up to 14 sorters.
BY Tim Ryan, Axiom Engineers,
Monterey, CA
O
SCHEID VINEYARDS
efficiency
with quality
Automated belt delivery system, with variable speed drive, delivers grapes to any press
door with a minimum of conveyors and labor required to operate the crush pad.
ne of the first things that visitors will notice in the Scheid
Winery (Greenfield, CA) is the
abundance of space and welllit, efficient work areas. This was no
accident, as the design team, consisting of Scheid personnel and design
professionals from Axiom Engineers
(Monterey and Napa, CA), working
in conjunction with the Belli
Architectural Group (Salinas, CA),
were given this task at the first of
many design meetings.
Kurt Gollnick, COO of Scheid
Vineyards, explains Scheid’s vision,
which was to maintain and enhance
quality without losing high production-rate capabilities. Scheid cur-
Mobile Diemme press leaves a fermentor after
pressing to unload pomace at crush pad.
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
COVER STORY
Large-volume receiving hopper has a custom-designed proprietary “low shear” progressivepitch, 24-inch diameter screw with flight edging that minimizes maceration of grapes. The
hopper is 8-feet wide, 20 feet long with 41 inches of depth (13 inches over standard) to
provide the capacity to accommodate high receiving rates (up to 100 tons per hour). To
maintain a required 36-inch grape truck dump height (the distance from ground to hopper
lip), accommodate the additional 13 inches of depth, and provide 37-degree sloped hopper
walls, the frame was custom-designed to allow the hopper to fit into a 12-inch recess in the
concrete foundation by P&L Specialties.
rently provides custom processing
and juicing for 15 customers. “This is
a production winery in Monterey
County,” he notes, “not a ridge-top
winery in Napa Valley planning to
make money on wine-tasting
events.”
The design team translated this
message to mean low-maceration
grape handling whenever possible
at an initial 100 tons per hour crush
rate, for 12,000 tons per year production in the first-phase winery, with a
goal of expansion to an ultimate
capacity of 30,000 tons per year.
The design approach to accomplish this vision involved frequent
open communication with Scheid
personnel and custom winery
clients, to ultimately provide winemaker David Nagengast with the
tools to make quality wine.
The team saw the concept as similar to that in the baseball movie A
Field of Dreams, but in winery design
the expression became, “If you build
it, they will use it.” “You” referred to
the owners, design professionals,
and contractors, and “they” referred
to the skilled artisans — winemakers
and cellar masters — who turn highquality Central Coast grapes into
premium wines.
The winery is located south of
Greenfield, CA just west of Highway
101, for easy access to receive grapes
and ship bulk wine. It is centrally
located to the majority of Monterey
and San Benito County vineyards
whose wine grapes it processes,
which provides major cost and quality advantages (reduced maceration
of grapes and oxidation of the juice).
Short shipping distances mean low
transit costs and allow machine harvesting of grapes.
A raised truck-dumping area
allows whole-cluster or machineharvested white grapes to be delivered directly to tank presses — 50
tons of whole-cluster whites or 60
tons of machine-harvested whites
per press load — without any pumping. This is an effective and economical low-maceration design feature
that produces significant quality
benefits compared to crushing and
pumping whites through an axial
feed into a press.
A major design feature on the
press pad is a grape receiving system that allows a quick changeover
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
COVER STORY
from red to white grapes. One automatic air cylinder changes the grape
flow from the receiving hopper to a
white inspection belt before loading
into a press, or from the receiving
hopper to a red inspection belt to
destemmer/crusher to must pump.
Hand-sorting capability at reduced
throughputs (with variable speed
belts) is available for both white and
red grapes.
Cleanup required to go from reds
to whites is confined to the stainless
steel receiving hopper only. Belt conveyors that see red grapes never see
white grapes, and vice versa.
The red, white, and pomace cleanin-place (CIP) belt cleaning systems
allow a changeover from reds to
whites to occur in a very short time
frame; this saved the cost of a separate red and white unloading system
in Phase I construction. Such rapid
changeover and sanitation was a
major factor in choosing a receiving
hopper with a screw-feed versus a
belted grape receiving hopper.
The receiving hopper has a stainless steel variable-speed screw with
a wedge wire free run drain system
for pre-draining ahead of the press
that allows free run juice to bypass
the press and increase pressing
capacity. Pre-draining ahead of the
destemmer has the added benefit of
reducing juice lost through adhesion
to ejected stems. The 24-inch diameter progressive screw conveyor has
three pitches: 12-inch, 18-inch, and
24-inch.
Grape receiving can easily be handled by three people — a weighmaster weighing in and out trucks; a
receiving-hopper/press operator
who unloads trucks via wireless control, fills presses, or feeds the
destemmer/crusher; and a cellar
worker who pumps either must or
juice to tanks in the winery and performs sanitation and cleanup. All
grape processing equipment is managed with an Allen-Bradley
PanelView touch-screen display.
P&L Specialties’ automated belt conveyor delivers fruit to any press door from one conveyor
with minimal fruit damage and loss associated with multiple conveyor systems, and allows
for hand-sorting of grapes as the conveyor can be slowed to 24 feet per minute (about 3
seconds per foot). There are 69 linear feet of conveyor where sorters have access to grapes.
One
frequently
overlooked
design feature of a winery is an
extensive catwalk system that allows
operators to get from the truck
dumping/crushing and destemmer/press area into the winery cellar, and to the top of each and every
fermentor, with a minimum of stair
climbing. This allows operators filling tanks to communicate with cellar
workers in an effective manner and
minimizes the chances of operator
error and injury.
In the indoor winery cellar, there
are three fermentation tank styles.
All fermentors have one essential
feature in common, which is that
under normal winery operations,
there is never a reason to enter a fermentor. This avoidance of routine
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
COVER STORY
confined-space entry means a major
improvement in workplace safety.
Labor, safety, and operating cost savings were an essential Scheid design
requirement.
Three fermentor tank styles
include: open-top fermentors with
punch-down cap management,
sloped-bottom red fermentors with
automatic diaphragm pump-over
cap management, and white wine
fermentors. There is no sluicing,
shoveling, screw, or tube screw-conveying of any wet must, to maintain
quality at the highest levels possible.
This, combined with whole-cluster
P&L Specialties’ incline conveyor has a
proprietary “sealed sump” to collect free
run juice, motorized head pulley for reliability, clean-in-place system for sanitation, and Rare Earth magnet for collection
of material other than grapes (MOG). The
conveyor belting is 36 inches wide with
cupped cleats (2.5 inches deep) to convey
gently and allow for high processing
speeds of 100+ tons per hour.
white grape pressing, allow this
large production winery to perform
like a high-quality, low-throughput
estate winery.
Open-top red fermentors receive
12 tons of grapes from a Diemme 90
destemmer/crusher with a progressive cavity must pump (six-inch outflow) through permanently installed
six inch-diameter overhead must
lines fitted with stainless steel 3-way
ball vales for ease of sanitation.
These fermentors are served by two
traveling punch-down devices for
cap management. They are used primarily for Scheid’s high-value Pinot
Noir program, which receives the
gentlest handling possible.
The fermentors are mounted
directly above gravity drain tanks to
receive free-run wine. Fermented
grapes are pressed off by a mobile
tank press, which is gravity-fed
directly from a fermentor, with press
wine being pumped back to the free-
run tank to maintain lot control or
pumped to a separate tank. The 5hectoliter (12-ton) fermented red
mobile press is driven to the outside
press yard to dump pomace into the
pomace removal system.
All fermentors are equipped with
warm and cold glycol in all jackets
controlled with automatic three-way
valves. This allows the cellarmaster
to cool a tank prior to starting fermentation, then quickly warm a fermentor with warm glycol to jumpstart a fermentation or to encourage
malolactic fermentation. This system
was installed to allow the winemaker and cellarmaster maximum
flexibility to start fermentation, and
to maximize the number of turns
these high cost-per-gallon red fermentors can generate during harvest.
Tank temperature control is with
TankNET® controllers, coupled with
a special three-way ball valve developed specifically to work with them.
Red fermentors include 12,000
gallons, 19,000 gallons, 25,000 gal-
Buddy Masuda demonstrates pneumatic
punch-down mounted on two I-beams for
access to 6-ton and 12-ton open-top red
wine fermentors.
Three-way control valves for heating and
cooling of tank jackets. Use of three-way
valves eliminated two valves and actuators
for each tank and saves maintenance time.
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
COVER STORY
lons, and 32,000-gallon tanks supported by tank legs designed to meet
seismic zone-4 requirements, that
were constructed by JV Northwest
(Canby, OR). These fermentors are
the workhorses of the red winery,
yet they have the same features as
the open-top fermentors, with the
exception of punch-down cap management.
The fermentors each have a compressed-air diaphragm pump-over/
cap irrigation system. Scheduling of
this system can be automatic and
programmed by the cellarmaster
Catwalk platform over red fermentors, provides large open access to top man-doors.
1. Diemme Millenium 430 Press
2. Diemme Millenium 430 Press
3A. Diemme AR 50 Mobile Press in pomace dump position
3B. Diemme AR 50 Mobile Press in fermented grape collection position
directly into the TankNET® controller, which serves dual duty as
both pump-over and temperature
controller. The advantage of having
this controlled automatically is that
the pump-over occurs when the
winemaker requests it.
4. Grape receiving hopper
5. Diemme Kappa 90 Destemmer/Crusher
6. Diemme Millenium 430 Rolling Press in loading position
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
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All floors are sloped to trench drains with
oversized drainage piping, to allow quick
drainage of surface liquid anywhere in the
building.
Diemme Millenium 430 tank press ready to receive pomace from red fermentor.
Catwalk-mounted hose station with hot
and cold wash-down water, compressed
air, and nitrogen supply. Each station has
a 50' hose allowing wash-down
anywhere in the building. The Parsec
micro-oxygenation system for 120 tanks
has five-tank remote controllers (right in
photo) throughout the tank room.
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
COVER STORY
In the large red fermentors,
which have warm and cold glycol
jackets to maximize cellarmaster
flexibility and fermentor turn-over,
drained must slides out of the fermentor down a sloped bottom and
through a 30-inch square door, to
minimize bridging. The must is
then elevated by a crescent belt
incline conveyor directly into a
traveling tank press. This press does
double duty (on the press pad) as a
white press when not pressing reds.
The wine is pressed out in-place in
front of the fermentor. The press
then travels to the press yard to
unload the pomace.
All three types of fermentors are
located indoors in an insulated
building. Skylights occupying 3% of
the roof area allow natural light so
the winemaker can better judge
wine color during the day. This
earned Scheid a utility-company
rebate to cover part of the added
expense.
At night, the facility is well-lit
with high-density metal halide light
fixtures, to provide high-quality
white light with a bare minimum of
shadowing. This provides a safe
work area during all hours of the
night, to keep nighttime operations
on a par with daytime operations.
The walls and roof are insulated
urethane panels. No additional
mechanical cooling is required to
maintain a year-round ambient
temperature of 60ºF to 62ºF, beyond
the radiant cooling from chilled
wine tanks. Future plans call for a
55ºF mechanically-cooled storage
room with unjacketed storage tanks
for optimum wine storage.
Sanitation is a major issue in
every winery and Scheid Winery’s
spacious and open work areas were
designed with ease of sanitation in
mind. Roof-support columns, catwalk-support columns, and pipe
supports are minimized to improve
sanitation. Concrete floors all slope
Square bottom door (30" wide) of red fermentor minimizes bridging during removal of
drained must.
to continuous floor drains at sufficient slope to avoid pooling and
standing water.
The industrial waste piping is
oversized to avoid backing up of
drains and pooling of water on the
floor when cleaning tanks. No working area of the winery is more than 50
feet from a Strahman hot and cold
water mixing wash station capable of
delivering 75 psig water pressure at
temperatures ranging from cold to
180ºF for tank sanitation.
The walls and ceiling have no
open insulation, and are suitable for
direct wash-down. All platforms and
catwalks are of aluminum construction to avoid corrosion, and the
TankNET® controllers for two tanks.
TankNET® software provides birds’ eye
view of Scheid cellar operations. Includes
tank temperatures, lot codes, Brix
measurements, and pump-overs. Web
browser interface enables winemakers to
manage fermentations from any location,
including changing set-points, scheduling
pump-overs, and viewing fermentation
graphs.
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
COVER STORY
for both male and female employees. The mechanical room and
refrigeration room are in structures
attached to the winery and only
accessible to authorized personnel.
They consist of a forced-draft Bryan
hot water boiler, a VFD-style Atlas
Copco air compressor, and 3,000gallon hot water storage tank with
a winery recirculation system for
instant hot water availability.
The refrigeration system is
ammonia-based for green environmental purposes, with Vilter compressors and Evapco evaporative
condensers. This is a highly efficient refrigeration system and is
expandable with an additional
compressor to handle the forecasted build-out to 30,000 tons of
grape crush.
Fermented must is delivered to rolling press by incline conveyor.
New tank installation for phase two expansion of the winery. Many of the tanks will be
enclosed by a new building to be constructed.
building’s steel surfaces are painted
with an epoxy paint system.
The entire winery is designed
with a three-inch diameter sanitary
wine pipe system feeding to central
connection stations. Any wine tank
or press tank can be connected by
sanitary wine hose to any other
tank or tanker truck loading station
through these connection stations
and the stainless piping system.
The utilities are all routed overhead, supported from the catwalk
system, out of the production area.
They consist of hot and cold water,
compressed air, an inert gas system, hot and cold glycol, and a
micro-oxygen system for certain
wine tanks used for custom-finishing of wines on request from customers.
Hidden parts of the winery also
show Scheid’s commitment to quality. The employee services area has
wash-down floors, more than adequate space, and a full locker room
Wine transfer station allowing for movement of wine from one tank to any other
tank in the winery.
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
COVER STORY
The winery collects all waste
water, prescreens and pond-aerates
it for BOD reduction. This water is
ultimately used for vineyard irrigation and serves dual duty as the
facility’s fire protection pond.
Pomace is collected and stored on
site, where it is composted and
added back to the vineyards as part
of the farming operation.
n
Tim Ryan P.E. is principal in charge
of winery projects at Axiom
SM
Engineers . Axiom’s team includes
industry veterans Ray Cole and George
Deponte who have designed wineries
ranging from 2,000 cases per year
capacity to 40,000 tons per year.
Lycos rotating screen used to remove seeds
during red fermentation pump-overs.
Reprinted from:
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