Leading the Wine Industry to Great Tasting Wine

Anton Paar’s latest innovation can be used for all samples in the entire production process, from fermentation monitoring to quality control of the bottled product.

Anton Paar is an Austrian high-precision measuring instrument manufacturer and the world’s leading provider of alcohol and density measurement in the wine industry. It has been a partner to the wine industry for decades and it has done so, by the creation of instruments such as the DMA 35, the Alex 500 and the Alcolyzer Wine M/ME.

Daily density checks on fermenting wine can be considerably faster with the portable density meter DMA 35, compared to methods such as glass hydrometers. A DMA 35 single measurement takes a few seconds and requires a small sample of only 2 milliliters. The temperature influence on the measured value is automatically compensated. To speed up checks even further, an RFID tag programmed with a unique sample name is attached to the wine tank or barrel. Anton Paar’s DMA 35 reads this RFID tag and identifies the name of a sample in just one second. As Andrew Cameron from “Delegat’s Wine Estate” Winery in New Zealand reports: “We have recently equipped our entire stainless steel winery (more than 300 tanks) with RFID tags. In the past, we always had the problem of having to keep handwritten records and manually type in the extensive lists of data into a spreadsheet. Many hours of data entry and re-sampling due to transcription errors have now been reduced due to automatic data handling”. As the sample ID is saved with the measured values, results are traceable no matter how many different instruments and operators are involved in the measuring process.

Anton Paar’s latest innovation, Alex 500, alcohol and extract meter, can be used for all samples in the entire production process, from fermentation monitoring to quality control of the bottled product. When the compact, robust, and easily operated instrument is used in the fermentation monitor mode, it directly displays a fermentation curve, assigned to a tank via sample ID. At the end of the wine’s fermentation, it can be switched to its standard mode, to determine the wine’s alcohol and total extract content with lab-grade accuracy. Alex 500 measures alcohol with an accuracy of 0.2 % v/v and determines density with an accuracy of 0.001 g/cm³. With these numbers, winery masters can be certain about their wine’s taste and quality, but best of all, they can be sure their winemaking process is reliably monitored and undesired deviations in production are immediately corrected.

Winemakers can take the testing process into their own hands. The Alcolyzer Wine M/ME provides precise alcohol determination (%v/v) of wine, sparkling wine, cider, rice wine, alcopops and fermenting must. It uses a NIR-based patented method (US 6,690,015; AT 406711) to determine the alcohol content in a highly alcohol-specific range. For this reason, the other constituents of the beverage do not influence the result and the measurement is valid for all vintages, regions and products. Another perk of the Alcolyzer Wine M/ME, is that it measures completely different samples (e.g. red and white wine) one after another with the same adjustment and no cleaning required between measurements. To increase efficiency even more, the Plug and Play Xsample 122 sample changer, automates up to 24 measurements at once. With the Xsample 122, filling and measurement takes less than three minutes per sample.

With these Anton Paar solutions wine producers will not have to look back at their past, but they will only look forward towards better quality and control of their wine and overall saving lots of time.

Visit http://www.anton-paar.com to contact your local Anton Paar expert!