I was just making my way through the latest issue of TONG on Alsace.
There is an article written by Pierre Trimbach in which he discusses making white wine in Alsace.
Within the article he talks about fermentation temperature and what controls they use to keep ferments constant.
He describes a tank mounted unit that controls temperature by monitoring the sugar converted daily by the C02 released. The then apparently adjusts temperature up or down automatically depending on the result to help maintain a consistent and healthy ferment.
He said they have been very happy with the results.
Has anyone used a system like this, or know who produces such a system?
He says it was provided to them by a German company.
Interested to hear your opinions.
to start, I have not worked with anything like this. It sounds like they have to manually adjust the temperature based on some ideas they have as to how the kinetics of the ferments should go, so really all this system seems to be doing is replacing taking a sample and testing brix each day to check how the ferment is progressing. I can’t say for sure, but i would think that if any winemaker is being that sensitive so as to adjust your tank temperature every day, then they probably would be pulling a sample to taste/smell, so why not take a quick brix reading then? I don’t really see how installing a gas flow meter on every single tank would be worth the money in this case unless you really hate reading brix (not to mention, every one of your tanks would have to be a closed tank for this to work).
just my opinion though.