Enolmatic bottle filler notes, hints and tips

[BarrelMonkey]

I just did my first bottling run with my new Enolmatic bottle filler. I know that several others here have this machine too, so I thought it might be useful to have a thread where we can compare notes, hints and tips etc.

Bottom line: I'm happy with my first experience, though there are a few tweaks that I'll apply before my next use.

More detailed notes:

We (Mrs Monkey and I) bottled ~5 gal of 2022 white wine 'field blend' - about 50:50 chardonnay/white pinot noir with a little viognier. We picked the grapes ourselves so this is my first completely 'soup to nuts' wine (though I didn't grow the grapes!)

• We cleaned the Enolmatic by filling ~6 bottles with sodium peroxycarbonate, followed by ~6 bottles tartaric acid. Dissolved peroxy in a little hot water first and made sure no solids remaining to go into Enolmatic.
• The Enolmatic siphon straw lets in air at the junction in the middle. We tried clamping both sides with hose clamps but it still leaked. Ended up just using the bottom half of the siphon straw and clamping the hose onto the rim of the carboy mouth. For future use I will try to source a suitable sized single cane (either food grade stainless or plastic). It will need to be long enough to fill from both carboys and kegs.
• Our first try with wine did not pull vacuum – we needed to seat the tiny o-ring at the vent in the vacuum chamber. It seems super tiny and fragile, but worked well after we took care to seat it initially.
• Some issues with slightly inconsistent fill level at first; it appears that you need to wait a couple of seconds after fill stops for the ‘backwash’ to pour back in the bottle. I’m sure it will get better with practice.
• We filled at a rate of ~5 minutes per case, even with some first day stops and starts.
• Close down: wash with peroxy/tartaric as start up, rinse with water and leave to dry.

Would love to hear about how others have found their experience with the Enolmatic, and any words of wisdom!

 

[CDrew]

I've had one for 3-4 years and I'm a big fan. You are right, the siphon straw is worthless plastic junk and I tossed mine out. I connect the hose directly to a barbed outlet from my fill tank. That works perfectly.

The o-rings are easy to work with but much easier to use if coated with a food grade silicone grease. Especially the big o-ring in the lid of the main chamber. But even the little o-rings on the lid fittings work better with a slight coat of silicone grease.

i'm sure you figured out the consistent fill thing. You need to let it fill until even the bubbles in the top are gone. Then it fill perfectly every time. You can adjust the ullage level with the plastic screw fitting on the body of the fill head. You will need to adjust this depending on the length of corks you are using.

The vacuum adjustment is important too. Too fast and you get more bubbles and foam in the filling bottle. Too slow and it takes forever. I usually set to medium and just let it go.

I clean mine by running Oxiclean through it and then sanitize with a sulfite solution. Once sanitized, I fill about 1/2 bottle and discard and then start bottling for real. After bottling, I run oxiclean solution through it followed by water, and wash the lid and bowl as well with oxiclean and rinse with water.

I like mine and would buy again, but you do need to mod it a bit to make it work right. The most important thing is to never use the plastic siphon straw! The instructions that come with it are also not that great. I need to replace my tubing at some point and it's metric PVC. I hope that's available on Amazon. I'll try and come back with a picture of how I set it up to bottle 15 gal at a time (6 cases).

 

[Rice_Guy]

... I need to replace my tubing at some point and it's metric PVC. I hope that's available on Amazon.

you can bend / form polyethylene tubing / stretch to shrink polyethylene tubing with heat from a gas stove or propane torch.
Metric tubing form China is on Amazon.

 

[BarrelMonkey]

Thank you @CDrew, this is really helpful. The tubing thing makes sense; when I decided to ditch the plastic straw, I found that my 3/8" tubing/racking wand was too small and 1/2" too big. Of course it would be metric since it's Italian...

What kind of tank is that? I don't think I've seen that design with a canted top and triclover connections.

 

[CDrew]

Thank you @CDrew, this is really helpful. The tubing thing makes sense; when I decided to ditch the plastic straw, I found that my 3/8" tubing/racking wand was too small and 1/2" too big. Of course it would be metric since it's Italian...

What kind of tank is that? I don't think I've seen that design with a canted top and triclover connections.

It's an Intellitank. It can be used for aging or whatever you want. I have 4 that I use for various tasks, but as a bottling tank it is outstanding. I'll vacuum the wine into the bottling tank, then change fittings around a bottle directly out of it.

 

[leomaff]

Now that I've stopped using the manufactures' angled siphoning/racking tube the device works great.
I attached a food grade clear hose without any connectors from the side of the Enolmatic arm to a RIGID food grade racking tube on the wine source side. This flexible hose ends about 1/2 inch shorter than the rigid tube. The flexible hose and the tube are connected by several small zip ties (nip off the extra tails on the zip ties). After sanitizing, etc the system can reach the bottom of a barrell (or whatever is holding your wine) with ease.

 

[Maheesh]

anyone know what metric size tubing the arm takes?

 

[BarrelMonkey]

anyone know what metric size tubing the arm takes?

I measured it and it looks like the large tubing (which connects the siphon tube to the unit) is 10mm internal diameter.

 

[BarrelMonkey]

Does anyone have any ideas where to source a 10mm (straight) OD racking cane? I'm open to either food grade plastic or stainless steel. All of the stainless rods that I've found are too short (25 or 30cm), I was hoping for more like 3ft/1m...

ETA: Well, I answered my own question... it turns out that the enolmatic hose does fit onto a 1/2" racking cane. Problem solved!

 

[SteveM]

Has anyone else had issues with the tip leaking? I have tried adjusting the pressure, but it continues to leak.

 

[Amd73]

Hi all, I’ve wondering if there’s a way to reduce the amount of wine that overflows into the vacuum chamber? When the four bottles are on the filler, there’s little foamy dribbles of wine constantly entering the chamber. I have to empty the chamber every 6 dozen and the wine tastes a bit flat, so I’m not overly impressed by how often it needs to be emptied. We have the vacuum set at around the half way mark. Would love any tips ! Thank in advance

 

[Rice_Guy]

Foam in a vacuum corking setup means that I have not fully degassed the wine. “Good enough” for pulling 20” Hg plus at corking is that I can hold a -5” Hg on the degassed carboy for half an hour.

@Amd73 In your filler operation you should reduce reduce the foam by reducing the vacuum, should slow filling for you. A second variable is “pressure head” from your source carboy. An easy way to create pressure head is to put two milk crates under the source. The factory way is to actually pump out of the source tank.

 

[HoCo Al]

Has anyone else had issues with the tip leaking? I have tried adjusting the pressure, but it continues to leak.

No leaking here, but I did just replace the entire fill nozzle assembly on mine with a new one. Got it from Morewinemaking.com for $79.99 (free shipping).

I had bought mine used about 5 years ago, and as I started bottling a few weeks ago I noticed that there was a crack in the plastic tip of the nozzle. Didn't seem to be actually causing any problem, but decided just to be safe to replace the whole assembly. I thought the $79.99 price was reasonable given the cost of a new Enolmatic. Don't know how old yours is, but if it's more than a couple of years maybe you should consider getting a new nozzle assembly.

 

[Philipp Baumann]

How does this filler work if you have to have a 200L tank on the ground and want to keep the filler on a table next to the tank? Essentially, will have to draw the wine from the bottom of the tank at some point with little head pressure up to about 2.5 to 3 feet on the table.

 

[BarrelMonkey]

How does this filler work if you have to have a 200L tank on the ground and want to keep the filler on a table next to the tank? Essentially, will have to draw the wine from the bottom of the tank at some point with little head pressure up to about 2.5 to 3 feet on the table.

It works just fine - that's how I use it.