The wine business is consistently confronted with new developments, challenges and the stress to remain forward of the competitors. With that comes the chance to innovate.
Every year, Wine Business Community acknowledges 5 wine business innovators — not only for their spectacular ingenuity or technical advances — however due to how their product and/or service betters the North American wine business.
By Jeff Siegel
Name it the Holy Grail of winemaking: discover a method to cut back the quantity of sulfur dioxide added to wine, but nonetheless produce a wine with minimal spoilage.
“There’s a excessive demand for discount of SO2 use in winemaking,” says Eglantine Chauffour, oenology director of Bucher Vaslin North America, which offers winemaking gear, enological merchandise and technical providers and is the unique distributor of Lamothe-Abiet’s winemaking merchandise. “We’ve been finding out SO2 alternate options for a number of years, specializing in vegan, allergen-free, and pure approaches. We impressed ourselves from the pure equilibrium and bio-protection idea.”
It took 5 years to develop the Lamothe-Abiet product, known as Excellence B-Nature, an alternative choice to SO2 that controls microbial spoilage with out altering wine profile and fermentation capacities, says Chauffour. The product was remoted from grapes within the Stellenbosch area of South Africa and is a pure Metschnikowia Pulcherrima pressure. This dwelling organism colonizes and occupies the ecological area of interest of the grapes or juice, thus limiting the event of undesirable indigenous microorganisms, “We name it a bio-protector,” she says.
Excellence B-Nature develops rapidly on grapes and juice after harvest, colonizing the surroundings, reducing the inhabitants of spoilage microbes like Brettanomyces, different non-Saccharomyces, lactic acid micro organism and acetic acid micro organism. It additionally promotes the right growth of constructive microbes, reminiscent of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to take over and begin the fermentation.
It’s extraordinarily straightforward to use. Simply sprinkle the dry yeast, with out preparation, on high of the grapes as quickly as attainable after selecting, whether or not throughout transportation to the vineyard (if it takes longer than half-hour) or transportation of juice, throughout delays between selecting the grapes and processing or between processing steps reminiscent of chilly soaking and maceration.
“Typically, there’s no want so as to add SO2,” says Chauffour. B-Nature not solely protects grapes and juices from microbial spoilage, but in addition consumes oxygen and reduces the chance of oxidation. The product will also be used as a sprig to guard gear, together with machine harvesters, selecting bins, de-stemmers, presses and gear drain channels.
“It took a very long time — many repetitions, many trials — to lastly discover the pressure that met all of the parameters we needed for it,” says Chauffour. “We wanted to search out a terrific various to SO2 that controls microbial spoilage with out altering wine profile and fermentation capacities.”
Winemakers who’ve used the product have adopted it on their full harvest and proceed to make use of it as a part of their course of.
“B-Nature, for us, is a good product,” says Inglenook affiliate winemaker Jonathan Tyer, who has used B-Nature for 3 years. “It really works very nicely with our wines, lets us go very low sulfur/no sulfur on the crushpad and, throughout fermentation, we truly get softer and extra elegant tannins, which is what we’re on the lookout for in our ultimate wines.
“The primary 12 months, once we performed our trial, I used to be nervous,” Tyer continues. “I used to be afraid of oxidation and afraid of VA taking up within the fermentation. However we didn’t have a difficulty with both of these issues, and the wine ended up being very stunning.”
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Jeff Siegel
Jeff Siegel is an award-winning wine author, in addition to the co-founder and former president of Drink Native Wine, the primary locavore wine motion. He has taught wine, beer, spirits, and beverage administration at El Centro Faculty and the Cordon Bleu in Dallas. He has written seven books, together with “The Wine Curmudgeon’s Information to Low cost Wine.”
