My question is not quite on point, but I cannot find a thread that addresses it. So here goes. I have always filtered (Buon Vino) and bottled on the same day. Recently I heard from a small-scale commercial winemaker (30-33K bottles a year) it is best to wait a day or two between filtering and bottling. I failed to ask for rationale. Any thoughts one way or the other?
.. If a factory has the capacity it will
ALWAYS bottle the commercially
sterile wine/ juice/ milk/ shelf stable food/ etc immediately after the treatment that preserves it. Yes there is a surge tank between these two operations for the purpose of having a smoothly running filler. Yes if an adjustment to SO
2 or adding flavor concentrates or blending varieties it may make sense to hold the wine but the risk is lower if these process steps are finished before sterile filtering. Holding in a tank is a risk and we work to minimize risk. If a commercial winery is small and has to hire a nitrogen bottling line on a trailer it will have filtered then bottled the wine before it leaves the trailer.
.. Commercial bottle lines run faster than sterile filters therefore it is not unusual to have one team member run a sterile process all night to fill a surge tank to run the bottle filler. The flux on filters decreases the longer they run therefore a larger surge provides safety factor on the filling line.
.. A small winery as with two full time production staff will operate better by treating filtration as a separate operation, adjust the sulphite when batch size is known, blending and take a break at end of day. Then sanitize and run bottling the next day.
DRY Wine is a preservative system therefore we can lock the doors and safely ignore the over night risk.
.. A winery which is operating with a four bottle hand filler is slow enough that it can start and stop filling without an issue.
.. We have nominal filters which are not sterile, with a nominal filter we can get crystal clarity so if a wine is dry this cheaper equipment setup works. An absolute filter means a sharp cut off that can remove bacteria, once it is commercially sterile (for example we stop at 10% alcohol with residual sugar) we keep clean.
..
@Ct Winemaker ,, My Buon Vino number one pads are not an absolute cut off filters. They will pull most yeast and bacteria out but if the volume were a 10K gallon tank I would be betting there was still some contamination in the filtrate,,, risk if I back sweeten.
. . .
and with this back to the original post
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