I saw my first optical sorter about 7 vintages ago. Frankly, they broke down a lot and I was not a fan. Then, about 4 years ago the new generation came out and I started to take a very close look. Three years ago the winery I crush at bought one and I watch it in awe. Now, I will not go to a winery without one. I will go even one further. To not own one (if you are a winery crushing at least 200 tons where sorting is used) is irresponsible, both for quality and financially.
Optical sorters take photos of everything that is on the sorting table. You can program it to remove anything you want. I watch over the process and each winemaker and lot can be specifically programed for. It blows out the material you want sorted berry by berry as they cascade into the bin. Since I make sure all fruit is already near perfect when it is picked, I only set the sorter to remove any stems, leaves or pips. Basically, green material. I doubt I have lost even 0.2% of my fruit the last two years. But in a year with shrivel, it would be a godsend.
The fact is, the new high minimum wages in CA (plus competition for labor from Mendocino pot farms making it hard to find labor at all), not even counting paperwork and FICA taxes and Obamacare mandates plus everything else our state puts in the way of hiring people has made technology move faster than it ever would have before.
Economically, when you have a 16 foot table with 8-10 people sorting on it, it can process maybe 1.5-2 tons per hour. Now, you can process 3-4 tons. And not only does this mean less overtime for the weary winery staff, but less money spent on labor and less paperwork. With staff being less tired, it leads to less mistakes and higher quality. Also, I have found that all these sorters tend to “look for something to do” and wind up sorting out fruit that should not be sorted out.
Instead of keeping a crew for 12-13 hours of monotonous sorting, they are home after 8. Less overtime. less labor. Better quality. It takes less time to clean, as the optical sorters are actually not large and your sorting tables are much shorter.
Optical sorters are here to stay. They are better, faster, more economical. It improves any wine it touches. Like I said, I will not crush in any facility without one at this point. It can cost $70,000 for those machines. But a busy winery can pay that off in a year in saved labor.
What’s next? Well, more and more wineries are moving to automatic pumpovers. Soon you will not need interns to labor over all that work either. You just program it on your iPhone to pumpover when you want. Since the worst mistakes of harvest are that tired staff pumping a Cabernet tank into a Pinot tank by mistake in hour number 14 of their tenth straight day of work, or pulling off a valve by mistake and sending $70,000 down the drain in 30 seconds (that happened to me once), you now have each tank with its own self-contained pump, with no chance of disaster. And you can hone in your pumpovers to exact specifications.
Here is a video of my fruit being sorted using one two years ago. See the final result in the last few seconds of this video and decide for yourself. Oh, and optical sorters have gotten better since this video was made.