The EuroSelect in Action

When the harvest season began, Gary contacted Darryl Fields and Natalie Spytkowsky about the possibility of seeing the EuroSelect in action. We visited them in April as part of our education on the various types of destemmer/crushers that are available. During that trip, Darryl took us to a small winery and showed us the layout. You can see that blogpost here: North to Canada---First Stop with Darryl Fields and the EuroSelect
This time, we were able to see the EuroSelect during harvest and this was very instructive. The winery that we visited produces approximately 1200 cases, which is what we hope to produce. The equipment was laid out to simulate gravity flow, which we also hope to build into our winery. Darryl, Sonia and Natalie have made their process at this winery very efficient. The grapes come from the vineyard in t-bins and are weighed on the blue scale shown below.

The t-bin is next arranged above the shaker table and Sonia removes the grapes from the t-bin onto the shaker table. During this process, Sonia will remove any MOG (Material Other than Grapes). Darryl mentioned that they were processing the grapes at about one ton an hour, which is on the slow side. The grapes were then transported to the EuroSelect which has a conveyer apparatus that moves the grapes into the fingers of the EuroSelect which gently removes the grapes from the rachis.

The destemmed grapes come out of a side shoot and are loaded onto a conveyor that moves the berries into a fermentation tank.

This is a picture of the Merlot grapes after picking in the lug, the grapes in the fermentation tank after destemming, and the rachis:

It's clear that a lot of thought went into the layout and design of the building to enable a smooth processing of grapes from the vineyard to the fermentation tank. We hope to emulate this design when we build our winery. Darryl, Natalie and Sonia were terrific! They allowed us to take photos and film and answered our many questions.