- Wine Wise Solutions
- Smart solutions for wineries
Safeguard your winery's success with smart solutions
Producing exceptional wine requires precision, care, and innovation. From maintaining optimal temperature control to preventing unnecessary losses, our solutions help you protect your wine, your equipment, and the environment.
To address these challenges and provide practical insights, we consulted Darryl Blackeby, a digital solutions and automation expert for ifm Australia. Based on his extensive experience, he recommends smart solutions designed to meet your winery's specific needs, ensuring the highest quality for your product while streamlining your winemaking process. Explore how we can support your craft and your commitment to excellence.
Protect your wine quality with temperature control
Temperature control plays a vital role in maintaining wine quality and gives producers the opportunity to improve the appearance and taste of their product.
“Maintaining a stable temperature of the wine during the various phases of its fermentation and processing is critical to ensuring that the final wine quality meets brand requirements. Huge fluctuations will not only impact the taste and appearance but could affect the overall safety of the wine product.” says Darryl Blackeby, digital solutions and automation expert at ifm Australia, a well-known wine country.
Despite the benefits that come with automating temperature control, many winemakers still control temperature manually. Why? Because automation solutions have been expensive, complex and difficult to find integrators to implement in the past. That’s not necessarily the case now.
The larger question is, can the industry afford not to adopt automated temperature control to remote monitor the fermentation of their wine? With manual methods, temperature measurements can be unreliable or inconsistent and lead to mistiming in the cooling activiation process.
“With market conditions as they are, coupled with the agricultural workforce shortage and more extreme environmental factors affecting grape yields, winemakers have to become more efficient in order to survive,” says Darryl. “Having remote monitoring capabilities in regards to temperature control is one of the ways to increase efficiency, as it can be pre-programmed to cool when it is most energy efficient – for example if the winery is using solar, this can happen in the day, or if they’re not on solar, they would programme it for the night time when rates are cheaper.”
According to Darryl, there are some automation solutions that ifm can help small to medium wineries with that are easy to set up and cost-effective: “We can connect smart temperature sensors to I/O blocks mounted in either small electrical enclosures or directly in the field,” he explains. “The smart I/O blocks are shared between four tanks are are connected to a central controller or human machine interface (HMI) screen with remote monitoring capabilities. Outputs are provided to control solenoids for cooling and heating is an option.” Alternatively, existing temperature sensors can be connected to a small display on a wine tank to control the cooling and heating solenoids on that singular tank.
Darryl says winemakers can contact ifm for advice about what to use, or how to start automating their temperature control. He stresses that ifm solutions have been designed to simplify the implementation process and deliver a fast return of investment. “The smart I/O block system is pre-programmed with only the tank temperature and cooling times required to be set up. We recommend using a local electrician, but other than that we can advice and assist on any automation requirements.”
Protect your production from unnecessary wine losses
When 30,000 litres of prosecco went to waste after a winery overfilled one of its tanks in Treviso, Italy, it made global news. Whilst that’s an extreme example, overspill or overfill is a big issue for wineries, often resulting in costly product losses and additional labour and maintenance expenses.
The fact is, these type of unnecessary wine losses from overfill can be prevented: “Many wineries are still quite manual in how they operate, and when it comes to filling a tank they may not have a level switch, or instead they have a manually-operated mechanical switch that is prone to sticking, and not a reliable way to prevent overfill,” says Darryl Blackeby, an ifm automation expert. “Overspill is a prevalent and frequent occurance in wineries – it only takes a person getting distracted when filling a tank or barrel for a spill to happen.” Importantly, this type of spillage and loss can be avoided.
Besides the loss of wine, overspill also has environmental implications: “The environmental impact of a wine spill has to be considered and so the cost of a clean-up goes beyond the product, the spill has to be processed through the wastewater treatment, which can have a big impact on a small winery,” says Darryl. “All businesses have to start looking at ways to reduce waste, not just for their bottom line, but for the sustainability of the planet.”
By deploying food grade sensors – that meet international hygiene standards – winemakers can experience better control of their processes.
“We can even include flow meters on portable pumps for blending and batching where there is a known quantity,” adds Darryl. “For example, we can apply these to 10,000 litre tanks where we have a known quantity for the tank and can monitor the fill rate, thus preventing any overfill.”
While Darryl acknowledges that there is some cost in automating these processes, the return of investment is swift. “The cost of wasting product will generally outweigh the investment in the technology – in fact, it only takes one spill to justify the use of these simple monitoring solutions.”
Protect your pumps from premature failure
One of the most common – and expensive – equipment failures that wineries experience is the premature failure of pumps. This often happens as a result of pumps running dry, and can be easily solved with a simple flow switch, says Darryl Blackeby of ifm, a digital solutions and automation expert.
According to Darryl, pumps often run dry at wineries due to a lack of monitoring.
“It's quite common to see pumps empty, especially if wineries are employing casual workers who may not understand the implications of a pump running dry,” he says. “We can prevent this happening by using flow sensors and level switches, or even cavitation monitoring.”
Importantly, having visibility across machine performance can also prevent other failures.
“We can prevent mechanical failures of pumps, centrifuges, bottling machinery – any kind of rotating equipment – by deploying sensors and simple controllers to monitor vibration and other aspects,” says Darryl. “We work with customers in the wine industry to come up with solutions that are cost-effective and beneficial to them. And there are some simple ways in which they can get visibility across their critical equipment to prevent failure and any unplanned operational downtime.”
In the case of monitoring pumps, a flow switch will indicate if there is not enough liquid inside, therefore shutting it down before it runs to fail.
“Our technology solutions are designed to protect what’s important to an individual customer. Every business is different. We will happily discuss options as to how we can help to protect your vital equipment in a manner that is cost-effective and viable.”
Protect the environment from winemaking waste
One of the most important processes at a winery is the management of wastewater – it must be managed correctly to prevent contamination of the environment.
From an environmental standpoint, wineries must abide the regulations set by both of local authorities and national environmental protection agencies.
“Managing wastewater is a critical subject due to the potential contamination of soil, groundwater or surface water,” says Darryl. “To protect ecosystem health, regulatory authorities no longer permit discharge to waterways and consequently, wastewater dispersion on land is becoming more widespread.”
Which is why monitoring solutions are essential.
“Everything in the wastewater at a winery is coming from the operations – such as unspent grapes and juice, alcohol or sugar remnants and chemicals from cleaning products,” says Darryl. “Often the best way to prevent contamination is to control what goes into the waste streams in the first place, which is where monitoring comes in.”
As a digital solutions and sensor automation supplier, ifm can help wineries with such solutions, including the effective monitoring of level, flow and pressure in wastewater treatment systems.
“If you can reduce the amount of overspills, you can reduce the load on the wastewater system by not having to process so much water – this is a big issue that can be addressed with monitoring levels, temperature and flow,” Darryl explains. “Another significant one is pumps, and we offer vibration monitoring to ensure the pumps don’t fail.”
Protect your product with barrel identification solutions
Using chalk to identify your wine batches? Chalk rubs off. Have you considered a fool proof system of identifying barrels?
According to Darryl Blackeby RFID tagging or bar-coding is a simple and effective way to ensure you’re keeping track of all the barrel contents in your wine cellar.
Despite the availability of this technology, Darryl says many smaller winemakers are using a manual process of labelling: “Writing on chalk or even using a sticker is not advisable as both of those labels can be damaged or disappear due to spillage,” he explains. “Also, digitised barrel identification enables traceability.”
Traceability is key to quality assurance – an increasing requirement in an age where fakes and fraudulent product are prominent in the wine market.
“There are a number of reasons to have digital traceability in your winery – one of those is to ensure your wine is authentic, as there are many counterfeits out there, and another is in the case of any questions around quality,” says Darryl. “Traceability provides a robust system for quality assurance, ensuring authenticity in the wine supply chain.”
Whilst some winemakers may question whether the technology is worth the cost, Darryl recommends speaking with experts from ifm to discuss suitable solutions: “It will probably cost a lot less than you think and the benefits will likely far outweigh the initial costs to set such a system up. We’ve been working with many wineries and are more than happy to share our experience and advice.”
