Keeping it Clean: Part 2

This is a continuation of the last post on sanitation in the winery. This time, we focus on tanks, parts and hoses:

As part of our everyday maintenance, the tanks need our attention. Generally speaking, the tanks are much more stable than the barrels. The main place they can go wrong is where the wine makes contact with air—at the top hatch, or manway, the opening at the very top of the tank. Once again, we use the sulphur/citric solution to treat the exposed wine surface and the underside of the manway door. Sometimes, despite our efforts, pesky film yeasts, appear on the exposed surface of the wine. It looks like a whitish film, sometimes with pronounced veins in it, like marble (I don’t have a pic of this cuz it never happens at Babcock J). If we see that, we use an extra strong sulphur spray, and that usually fixes it up within a few days. In addition, 3 times/week, we gas the top of the tanks with C02 which helps prevent oxidation. We just insert a bit of tubing running from a C02 cylinder into the tank and let it run for a few minutes, leaving blanket of C02 which sits on top of the wine, protecting it from air.

That’s our day-to-day maintenance of full tanks. Once we’ve emptied a tank, we need to clean it, thoroughly. In the case of a tank where the wine was just passing through (for example, a filtered wine, just there for a few days before bottling) a spray-down with the water hose might be enough, (until we have to use it again, at which point, we’ll sanitize). For tougher jobs, we’ll use our tank washer, a wand that goes in through the hole in the center of the top of the tank (known as the “guth”). The cylinder at the end spins around like in a dishwasher:

tank washer on top of tank with guth to the left and manway to the right

In the pic, a water hose is connected to the washer. We can blast hot water of 180 degrees F through there, and if that doesn’t do it, we can hook up hoses and a pump to circulate a caustic tank cleaner to remove residue. After the tank cleaner, we run a citric solution through to neutralize, and then water. AND, if the tank cleaner wash doesn’t do it, we crawl inside and scrub and scrub every inch till it’s shiny clean. Usually, every used tank needs a bit of a scrub to make it perfect.

In addition to the tanks, themselves, all the attachments need to be squeaky clean as well. When we’re going to use a tank, we strip off the valves (2 or 3, depending on the tank), take them apart, scrub them—first with proxy carb and then with PAA-- and put them back together again):

2-inch ball-valve from a tank

same valve in pieces

For all the fittings, we have a parts board of clamps, gaskets and other pipe attachments that allow us to make our hoses (and wines) go in every direction/configuration imaginable:

Finally, the cleanliness of the hoses we use is integral to the final cleanliness of the wine. We run PAA through them for 10 minutes before and after we use them, and keep them up on racks off the floor. A couple times/year, we do a thorough cleaning of the hoses, where we run cleaner, along with a squishy ball (like a nerf ball but more sticky/tacky) through. We get out all the hoses, hook them up to a pump, and mix up a big (80 gallon) batch of the sudsy, degreaser-type cleaner. Then the fun starts, as we shove the ball in one end (on the “out” side of the pump—it would mess up the pump if it went through):

putting the ball in the hose at the output end of the pump, top. The intake end is at the bottom of the pump.

We reattach the hose, turn on the pump, and the ball goes for a jolly ride through about 250 feet of hose. It’s cool, cuz you can see it go on its journey, pushing all the built-up goo ahead of it.

The ball pops out at the other end, we shut off the pump, grab the ball and start it over again. We do this several times until we’re convinced that our hoses are spotless.

This time of year, we have a whole new cleaning regimen to get into as harvest fast approaches. Next post: harvest prep!

Keeping it Clean--Part One

As mentioned in a recent post (Topping Up), grapes want nothing more than to be vinegar, and our job is to stop that process, midpoint, at the wine stage, and keep it there. Keeping all of our vessels completely topped up to the brim is one way to ensure this. Impeccable hygiene is another. It’s a big deal, and a big topic, so I’m dividing it up into two posts. Here is part 1.

It’s no exaggeration to say that 90% of winemaking is cleaning. At least, that’s the story at Babcock. Our former Associate Winemaker, Ron Hill, came from a medical background, and introduced some new protocols when he took over. “Hospital clean” is what we aim for, and while we might not be ready to perform surgery in the barrel room, we have a sound cleaning regimen in place. Yes, we use chemicals to clean everything that touches the wine, but we rinse well with clean water, and no residue gets into the wine.

To clean parts and vessels that have had wine in/on them, we use a product called Proxycarb (basically, that Oxyclean stuff you see on TV informercials). It takes the colour out lickety-split (and we take some home to use on our wine-stained workclothes). Then we rinse with water, and then use a sanitizer. For us, PAA (peroxyacetic acid and hydrogen peroxide) is the drug of choice. It sanitizes on contact—we just dip the part/vessel in, maybe give it a quick scrub if there are crevices involved, and we’re good to go. If we’re not using the part/vessel immediately, we put it away with the PAA unrinsed. If we are going to use it right away, we rinse it off with water. This PAA is a brilliant thing. A few weeks ago, we ran out of it, and had to make do with the old way of sanitizing, using Iodaphor, an iodine-based cleaner. For this one to work, you have to have 2 minutes of contact. What a difference! It seemed like our workday slowed to a crawl while we waited for everything to be sanitized, and it leaves a yellowy film on everything. Made me think about the scientific strides made in hygiene in winemaking over the years, and how most wine probably didn’t taste that great a hundred years ago.

A big part of our daily activities is to monitor and maintain the hygiene on all of our barrels and tanks that are holding wine. Every day, we check the barrels by making sure the bungs are in good and tight, and by looking for leaks. There is a wicking action that happens at the bunghole, occasionally, leaving a wet stain of wine on the outer surface of the barrel. Strangely, this can happen elsewhere on the barrel too. The barrel could be completely sound one week, and then leaking (not onto the floor, but enough to make the outer surface wet) the next. These wet spots are a great place for bacteria/fruitflies/mould to thrive, so we spray wet areas down daily with a sulphur/citric solution that will kill all the bad stuff.

When we empty a barrel, as you can imagine, it’s difficult to clean. Just one small hole in the top, and hard to see inside. Barrels have been around for hundreds of years. Once again, I wonder how they ever got the things clean in the old days. I suspect they didn't. These days, we have a barrel washer that helps us out. There are more high-tech ones out there, to be sure, but below is a pic of what we use. We position the barrels' bungholes facing down and the prongs lift to go inside.

We use a forklift to load the barrels onto the white rollers on the washer. Then we can easily spin the barrels to give them a good scrubbing with the proxy carb, before we clean the inside.

Once we’ve scrubbed the outside, we turn the barrel so the bungholes are down and insert the prongs:

The washer spins like a dishwasher. Here it is without the barrel on top:

Then we clean it, and how we do it varies according to the barrel. If it’s an old barrel, we may hit it with 10 minutes of 180-degrees-F water. If it’s a newer barrel, we don’t want to be so harsh, and will just wash it until the water coming out runs clear. Whichever we do, after that, we have a container of the PAA hooked up, and we put that through the washer for a minute or so. Once sanitized, if it's going to be used right away, we rinse with cold water. If not, we leave the PAA in it.

If we’re done with the barrel and are not going to use it, we put it away in the barrel room. The last thing we do is to give it a dose of S02 gas to finally kill anything that might be living inside. Then we pop a Dixie cup into the bunghole to keep out insects ( and any birds who might wander into the barrel room and see this as a $1000 birdhouse!).

More on sanitation next time!