It's all starting, around 60 tons of Maclaren Vale Shiraz is coming in today. All machine harvested, placed in large tipping bins, lifted with forklift and dumped into the hopper. It then gets carefully driven through the destemmer and must pump. You’ve got to be careful here as the fruit is so dry that if you drain all the juice through before the main body of the grapes enter the must pump it’ll jam it up. We saw the repercussion of this last Friday, everything was going fine until the juice ran dry, the must pump slowed down, and then stopped turning leaving pipes full of fruit. Overriding the safely cut out on the pump and restarting it, pushing more into the pipes, increasing the pressure only resulted in the pipes expanding like balloons. What happened next was the weakest point of the system gave out, splitting the pipes around the outflow of the must pump. In the end the whole thing was a massive mess that kept me and a colleague up till 2 in the morning clearing it up.
So today, it’s easy on the hopper, destemmer must pump and chiller, jus get that must into the tank with no dramas.
I'm working on getting some more photos up, but here's a few of the past week.
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