Yesterday I drove down the road to attend a 2 hour winery sanitation seminar put on at Rodney Strong winery by Vinquiry. It was pretty informative and I thought I’d share the main takeaways here for anyone interested in keeping their cellar a bit more clean.

And just so I don’t keep you in suspense, the answer is that your bung holes are filthy.

Just filthy.

And to save any uninterested wine consumers from having to read this whole thing to get any value, here’s the take away for you: it really does matter if the winery you are visiting or buying wine from is clean or not.

They don’t scrub-a-dub just to show off to tour groups. If you visit a winery with less than stellar sanitary conditions, you can be assured that you’ll most likely find the foul stench of Brett lurking in their wines at some point.

The seminar started with a presentation of some research on Brett by Neil Brown, a researcher working at Vinquiry. He went over the results of some tests he did on two strains of Brett and the growth cycle he found in Pinot Noir. Below is a simplified graph combining data from 4 trials that I created based on the information he provided (click image to enlarge).

A few interesting things from the graph:

• At 70 days there is no Brett, even though each sample was inoculated. Neil thinks that the yeast hang out in some from and bide their time until conditions in the wine become more favorable for them.
• There was no residual sugar in the wines he used, and they were all sterile filtered, so it’s not clear what the Brett was feeding off of. Alcohol in the Pinots shot down from 15.27% after fermentation to 13.75% however, so it could be those crafty Brett are using alcohol as food. I suppose this means that if you want to lower the alcohol in your wine and like some major sweaty horse blanket smells in your pinot, feel free to inoculate with Brett.
• I haven’t shown the formation of 4-EP or 4-EG (which are responsible for the animal and medicinal smell that we associate with Brett) in the graph, but they both rocket up to the red line somewhere between 250 and 350 days. The earliest 4-EP was detectable was just after 70 days and in very low concentrations.

Neil recommends microscope work during fermentation to check for spoilage orgs, and then recommends having the wine plated at around 90 days to check for Brett. I’d think maybe even sooner based on the data, say at 80 days.

An important caveat to the experiment is that no SO2 was used on the wines, so you shouldn’t expect results like this unless you’re making Roman Syrah (no SO2) or some other craziness.

But the main point about Brett that Neil passed along is that it is nearly impossible to eradicate from the winery completely. The buggers can only be controlled through proper sanitation applied religiously.

And that’s when Dr. Randy Worobo from Cornell jumped in and went over best practices in winery sanitation. It all boils down to a 5 step process.

1. Pre-rinse your crap.
2. Apply detergent, rotating between acid and alkali solutions, and scrub your crap. Then scrub it again.
3. Rinse your crap thoroughly.
4. Sanitize your crap with a 4 day on and 1 day off rotation of a peracetic acid/H2O2 combination and quaternary ammonium. (4 days acid/H2O2, then QUATS on Friday just before you leave for the weekend because it keeps your crap sanitized for longer periods of time).
5. Rinse your crap again, lovingly.

He also shared the results of a survey he performed on 8 wineries that show just how filthy most of our cellars actually are.

I’ll leave that for tomorrow since I’m running out of time. More then, including a video with a demonstration of a neat little gadget that’ll tell you exactly how filthy your ball valves and bung holes actually are (read: soiled).

Wine Info, Winery Sanitation