From Barron's Penta blog:
High-Tech Vineyards
Some vineyards are employing computerized robotics to hasten the business of harvesting. Napa Valley wineries like Conn Creek, Hall Wines, and Opus One are among the pioneers using the new technology called an “optical grape sorter,” a ten-foot long contraption used to separate good grapes from bad ones.
Used along with a gentle-crush destemmer, these high-tech sorters can do the work of a dozen-member crew at a fraction of the time. Some claim the optical sorter is the wine industry’s cotton-gin equivalent, streamlining laborious grape harvesting and processing.
France-based viticulture product manufacturer, Bucher Vaslin, makes one of two popular sorter brands. (The other is Pellenc.) The firm’s Delta R2 Vistalys, the second of its series, first appeared in the U.S. in 2009. Costing between $150,000 and $200,000 each, optical sorters are increasingly looked on as investments for larger or luxury-tier winemakers who are looking to boost efficiency.
It does just that. Once the wine director inputs specifications for the platonic ideal, the machine takes it from there. Cascades of destemmed grapes pour out onto a pegged conveyer belt, suggestive of a Chinese checker board. As the clusters are spread out evenly, the grapes are accelerated into the body of the optical sorter, where a camera takes pictures of each individual grape, snapping 10,000 frames per second. Offending berries, ones that don’t match the programmed criteria, are blasted off into a waste bin by high-pressure air. The good grapes are collected separately, ready for the next stages of crushing and aging.
“Cabernet caviar” is what Conn Creek Winery calls the intact grapes collected by the optical sorter. The St. Helena, California based winery bought the Delta R2 just last year after renting one on a trial-basis. Tom Klassen, the assisting winemaker at Conn Creek, told Penta that speed was one important reason the vineyard decided to make the $180,000 investment....MORE
