I’m setting up a company which will provide irradiation via gamma-rays for the wine industry. We will bring the gamma-source to your facility or to a facility within your town (a central location for a week so all wineries can bring stuff by to get irradiated)
We plan to irradiate barrels, new bottles and corks. This will remove all germs, bacteria, virus and other pathogens through the entire thickness/bulk of the barrel, bottle and cork. If you have them clean (no debris) we will get them sterile.
Clean bottles don’t need to be bleached or otherwise liquid sterilized. Irradiation is a dry process and elimiantes the cost of the liquid sterilizing component and the time it takes for those bottles to dry.
Barrels are cleaned of any brett or other pathogens all the way through the wood.
Corks will be sterilized to remove the bacteria which causes TCA.
Anything that you sterilize wet, we can now sterilize dry with no chemicals (i.e. you become “Green”). We remove all pathogens independent of how deep they penetrate the wood in the barrels or the corks.
Why am I posting this here?
I’m looking to see if wineries would be interested in such a service before I spend a lot of $$ and time getting stuff in place. I should be able to have it set-up before crush and be in place before you bottle your 2009 harvest.
(maybe before the 2008 harvest bottling but I’ve not yet figured out all the Calif permitting requirements for portable gamma sources)
Wow. If it’s affordable that would be a major innovation.
Question re: bottles. They come in sealed cardboard cases, tightly wrapped onto pallets. Is it cost and process effective to open the cases to irradiate the individual bottles and then just close the cases up with all that cardboard dust, vs. sparging the bottles right on the bottling line with nitrogen? Or would you just park each entire pallet inside a super-secret-container and irradiate the whole thing?
Whole thing…assuming that a portable device could accomodate that size. Then you woudl physically “clean” the bottles individually before filling with fermented grape juice.
I think the minimum size for a pallet of glass would have to be
12’W x 16’H x 15’D at a minimum.
But forgetting the glass, as Linda has pointed out, the most successful business model would be to have a portable unit that wineries could schedule for their location, like crossflow filtering or bottling lines.
My non-BS addition: Bill is right. People see “gamma” and “radiation” and assume “two-headed children, etc.” Even at wineries which tend to attract the logically-minded and more educated (well, not at any winery I’ve worked, but anyway), you’ll have a steep learning curve. A big part of a business like this would have to be marketing and education I’m guessing.
If you get this idea off the ground and need a young and enthusiastic sales and marketing guy to help, let me know. This concept sounds VERY interesting.
I’ve already started writing the patent, I think I can get it filed by Monday as my patent attorney says he has some time this weekend if I’ll buy him dinners as we work through it.
Yes education is a big part, regulation is another. Logistics, which is MY problem and not the wineries problem, is solveable. (I’m a big logistics guy). And at the base of the issue I can bring up “black sterilizing truck” and not tell you how, just provide you written documentation that things “are sterile”. My liability, not yours.
Mary, Linda, et al., size does not matter here. I can make a source big enough or small enough to suit any application. I can sterilize your entire winery if you want, or jsut one cork.
I’m working on the flow chart, and will keep that proprietary. We will promise not to interrupt your work flow and will find the most efficient means to get the job done. There are many ways to get this done and each winery may have different requirements or process flow. We’ll accommodate them all, or have strong recommendations based on “this is what has worked best in the past”.
Really super busy today so no time to get into specifics- glass is fired at thousands of degrees- the biggest problem is particulate matter getting into the bottles rather than microbes of any sort. TCA formation in corks is a chemical process that usually takes place in the forests where the cork is harvested, or in the cork processing facilities- once the TCA is present, it isn’t going away via radiation.
I asked because if there’s an FDA stamp of approval for the same gamma energy for food, it should be much easier to convince consumers that it’s safe enough for their bottles and corks.
I’ll need to get into the TCA but my recollection is that TCA is caused by a bacteria that lives in the cork. And yes it can start with that particular cork tree.
But this bacteria takes the chlorine used in the wineries and coverts the chlorine into TCA as we know it. By eliminating the bacteria before it can grab chlorine atoms, using irradiation, we have eliminated the chance of TCA being introduced into the wine via the cork.
No, sorry, I didn’t mean it literally. I just meant that the FDA has guidelines for gamma radiation energy levels permissible to kill bacteria in food, and that as a consumer, I wouldn’t be too concerned about irradiated corks if the energy level were within those guidelines.
There are a few ways to sterilize bottles. High temps, chemical compounds and irradiation. Finding the most cost effective, most efficient is the goal. Maybe it doesn’t apply to glass bottles and only to barrels. This business plan is about 1 day old at this point.
Yes I’m going to need to start touring wineries again or recruit those ITB who are willing to share their process info (how are bottles delivered to you, how do you prepare them before putting in wine, etc)
Ditto barrels, ditto corks, ditto fermenting tanks if people want those sterilized.
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