Friday, July 27, 2012

Looking for Stainless Steel Tanks

A week ago, we met with an engineer who represents a custom stainless steel tank maker. We will be a very small winery and that presents it's own challenges. We've been to many wineries and have seen their facilities and they have all been much larger than what we plan to be.
We would like our winery to be as gravity driven as possible and our building plans will take that into consideration. Getting the proper tank is a part of right-sizing the building. Toward those ends, the representative that we saw (trying still to be impartial, no names will be mentioned until we make a decision), will provide us with a schematic on how the tanks should be placed. This will help us immensely when we go to the architect with our plans.
For the first year we will be planting only white grapes but plan on planting some red variety in the future so we will need to purchase tanks to accommodate both white and red winemaking.
    Here is the computation:
  • 1 ton of grapes = 160 gallons of must
  • 160 gallons = approximately 800 bottles of wine
                          (160 gallons x Five 750 ml bottles)
  • 800 bottles = approximately 66 cases of wine
                          (800 divided by 12 bottles in a case)
For grape vines after the third year of planting, we expect to get approximately 2-3 tons per acre. Since we will begin with only 4 acres of grape vines that would mean a harvest of between 8-12 tons. We will have three different varieties of white wine grapes (Chardonnay, Chenin blanc and Auxerrois) which means that we will need at least 3 different stainless steel tanks. We will be looking at tanks that may be on the order of 300 gallons. The engineer that we spoke to mentioned that wine stored in variable capacity tanks also called floating lid tanks would need more care so he recommended that we stick with the fixed volume tanks and also recommended 60 gallon stainless steel tanks for any overage and to use for topping off when necessary.
We also will be getting some neutral oak barrels for the Chardonnay so we will need to plan on space for the barrels. The typical barrel can hold approximately 60 gallons which means approximately 25 cases from 1 barrel. Since the wine will be in the barrel for at least 18 months, we will have to project how many barrels we will be using for at least a season and a half.
Many things to think about!

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