After some online research and discussions with other winemakers it looks like wine making and computing have one thing in common: quality out is directly related to quality in. Since the grapes I am starting with input quality depends on front end processing. Some of the winemakers I have talked to rely on the picking crews for this but others use an additional preprocessing step.

As you might expect there’s all kinds of fancy gadgets including robotic & optical sorters (which cost more than I am willing to invest right now for this). If you are curious about this equipment check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY9R9igdiFw&t=9s to see one in action.

I decided to add a sorting table to aid in manual separation of waste (leaves & stems) and removal of grapes that are under ripe or damaged. I am also replacing the current crusher-destemer with a destemmer that I will use before crushing the grapes – the order does matter – crushing first can introduce bitter flavors if the grape seeds get crushed and “green” flavors from the stems.