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WineSecrets
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WineSecrets Ultra Filtration Mobile
WineSecrets Ultra Filtration Mobile
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Eric Dahlberg, President and Founder of WineSecrets
Eric Dahlberg WineSecrets
Eric Dahlberg, President and Founder of WineSecrets
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Rob Summers
Rob Summers, Winemaker at Hester Creek Estate Winery
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Sweet spot
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WineSecrets’ US headquarters in Sonoma County, California
WineSecrets' US headquarters in Sonoma County, California
Making good wine is a team effort. From viticulturists and vintners, there are dozens of people involved in creating a good wine. As a winemaker, you know it takes great grapes, expertise, and innovative technology to get your wine noticed in this competitive business. Eric Dahlberg, President and founder of Winesecrets is someone you want on your team. Dahlberg can cut winemaking costs drastically by bringing some of today's best technology right to your door. He's the one to call when, every now and then, despite your best efforts, you're left with the challenge of meeting customer expectations without the quality of fruit you would like to have.
Perhaps the wine suffered from premature browning, or the alcohol level was off just enough to make it not-quite-right. Maybe your whites weren't white enough or your pH or acidity is off just enough to diminish the quality that perfect batch.
That's where Dahlberg and Winesecrets can help. They have the right tools to make the vintage you’re hoping for and by coming to your winery, you save time and money too.
Dahlberg founded Winesecrets in 2003 to bring STARS (Selective Tartrate Removal) to market. STARS is a proven way to provide tartrate stabilization reduced titratable acidity and pH adjustment. Tartrate stabilization by STARS accelerates the traditional methods of cold stabilization while providing significant reductions in energy consumption. STARS uses a weak electrical field and highly selective membranes to transport organic salts out of wine.
STARS can replace energy-intensive bulk refrigeration previously used to accomplish this separation. It has become a must-have tool for sustainable wine production. Wine pH adjustment, a new derivative technology of the STARS electro-dialysis process, improves wine's color and flavour. Winesecrets is sole provider of this service in North America.
Rob Summers, winemaker at Hester Creek has been using STARS for about 12 years now. "I stabilize my whites and reds with STARS," he said. "The advantages are that it helps retains a lot of my aromatics in my whites and keeps them fresher. Traditional chill and feed is sometimes hard on an aromatic wine. Using STARS keeps wines fresher and I know my wines are stable."
Using STARS also gives winemakers huge energy savings. "If you haven't bought all the equipment, you don't need to because Winesecrets brings it to you," explained Summers. "I designed a winery in Niagara where the scope of the design was to use STARS. We probably saved a couple hundred thousand dollars in equipment at a 20,000 ton winery."
STARS has other uses as well. "If I do need to do any final acid adjustments, like with a final blend, you can use potassium and STARS will remove it. You can calcium stabilize and STARS will remove some of that too. If your pH is a little too high you can lower it with STARS," he said. "I stabilize my reds with STARS too. With chill and feed you have the potential to lose colour, with STARS you don't have to worry about that. You get a cleaner, more desirable wine this way. You've got to try it because once you try it you'll never go back. Having access to a mobile service is a big plus especially for medium to small size wineries."
There are other secrets you can use to turn good wine into great wine. Winesecrets has skid mounted STS 45 high performance centrifugal clarifiers. “We see this tool as offering the advantages of the centrifuge to medium sized producers." said Dahlberg. “This technology works well with our value-added, highly efficient separation technologies.”
Centrifuge usage can streamline winemaking operations during both harvest and preparation for blending and bottling. From white juice settling to bentonite lees removal, the STS technology greatly improves the effectiveness and efficiency of some of the most time consuming winemaking operations. "I've used this service before and the cost savings on the rest of your filtration is much lower and your wine is clean," said Summers. "I'd rather centrifuge my wine than have to filter it through five different mediums. You can save two to three traditional filtration steps with centrifuge. The losses are also lower when you use centrifuge. The sooner you can clean up your whites the fresher they stay."
Then there is the matter of alcohol concentration. Winesecrets offers alcohol adjustment as a mobile service using the reverse osmosis (RO) or the unique Memstar process. Not sure what the optimal alcohol concentration is for your wine? Conduct bench trials with Microstar to determine optimal alcohol level for an entire blend. Excessive alcohol can cause a wine to be hot or out of balance. Alcohol can accentuate astringency or give to the impression of sweetness to a dry wine. Winesecrets alcohol adjustment can assure the optimal alcohol concentration for each particular wine. The adjustments are done at your winery with their mobile service.
Summers loves the RO system. "It's a great thing because you can let your grapes hang out there, reach their optimum flavour, and not worry that you're going to get a 15 or 16% wine. I've been making wine for 27 years and 13.5 to 13.8 is the sweet spot for reds and whites. When there is too much alcohol in a wine, it makes the tannins more aggressive and it detracts from the body. As winemakers you may not want to use the technology, but you do need to know what's out there."
When you have technology out there like the mobile RO service, you have the option of waiting for the grapes to reach their flavour maturity. "Even though your sugars are going through the roof, you don't have to pick early and sacrifice flavour," said Summers. "I'd rather get my flavour and then do an alcohol adjustment. It's a balancing game for the winemaker. In the back of my mind, I know I can take a wine to 15% alcohol and fine tune it later with the mobile alcohol adjustment service."
When you find your wine somehow lacks in body or structure, Winesecrets can help by removing oxidized phenolics that cause pre-mature browning in red wines. Maybe your whites are a bit too pink or you need to reduce the bitterness and astringency from your wine. Winesecrets Ultrafiltration mobile service will come to your winery and within hours, you'll be on your way to an award winning wine.
"With the reds we can use it to concentrate what the wine has that is good in colour and flavour without concentrating acidity. For whites, we can remove unwanted colour and bitter flavours," said Dahlberg. "Your white wines become lighter, creating a more desirable end product."
Ultrafiltering red wine can also provide two separate wines that stand alone on their own merits: a partial concentration of color and tannin in a red wine (7-15%) can make it more robust. The permeate may be utilized in a rosé, blanc de noir or white zinfandel type of program.
Over the years, Winesecrets has helped thousands of winemakers. They service and sell to customers of all sizes in every major winemaking region in North America, and some you've never heard of. This growth is due to a combination of Eric Dahlberg's passion for helping winemakers create great wines, and the technology he provides.
"I've known Eric for 15 years now," said Summers. "and he is so passionate about what Winesecrets' equipment does and can do. We've tried a lot of his stuff. It baffles me why more winemakers in BC don't use it."
As for Dahlberg, he is constantly on the move, educating and helping winemakers across the continent. "Today, I love what I do. As a young man, when I left Calgary, I didn't even like wine," he laughed. "This isn't what I thought I'd do when I grew up. Today I am pleased to be able to offer enhanced capabilities to the North American wine industry."