Company History
Winesecrets is a company that offers the wine industry solutions to some of the problems posed by the changing climate, and the growing need for environmentally sustainable production methods. We focus on separation technologies that help wine producers to create more wine, better wine, cleaner wine, greener wine.
Winesecrets offers a variety of filtration technologies. We learned that the most formidable barrier to the adoption of most environmentally-friendly technologies is capital investment. We broke this barrier by mounting the equipment on trailers, and offering these technologies as a mobile service, greatly reducing the cost of use. We provide filtration equipment and services in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Niagara, and have worked in Illinois and Nevada. We share technologies with service providers in France, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile.
The problem of creating more from less:
In the coming years, American wine producers will be under pressure to meet market demands for wine that is forecast to increase by as much as 5% per year. It is questionable whether we will be able to expand the industries’ infrastructure in time. Electrical use, water use, and water discharge have the potential to limit our ability to meet this demand.
STARS is a filtration technology that used an electrical field to remove organic salts from wine, a process known as cold stabilization in the industry. The current method for cold stabilization involves bulk refrigeration of the wine over a prolonged period in hopes these salts will fall out. The new filtration method requires a fraction of the enormous amount of energy consumed by the refrigeration method, making it one of the most important tools for sustainable winemaking available today.
The California Energy Commission, an agency tasked with energy efficiency, saw gigawatts of energy savings if wine producers adopted this process. The Energy Commission offered Winesecrets a contract to demonstrate this technology to the wine industry.
PG & E estimates that between 1 and 3 kWH of electricity are required to produce a gallon of wine. If our industry is to boost our production over the next few years, wine producers will be looking for more electricity in a time when the State’s electrical utilities are under mandate to reduce net electrical consumption by 10%. To succeed, wine producers will need to turn to energy efficient technologies. Hand in hand with the electrical savings will be an indirect reduction in green-house gas emissions, a hot topic in this state.
How we help: our STARS system can reduce a winery’s electrical use by as much as 30%. The top 9 wineries can save enough power for 12,000 homes for one year and save themselves over $13 million in electricity costs per year.
Water promises to play an important role in California’s ability to sustain wine production. We are not alone, Australia is in the second year of a severe drought, which has reduced their harvest by 25% in 2007, and as much as 50% in the coming 08 vintage, promising to end the flow of inexpensive wines that we have enjoyed. It is estimated that 95 gallons of water are required for each gallon of wine. More and more wineries sip more and more water from the state’s aquifers, and the water table is dropping in many areas. Once you have used the water, you need get rid of it. The favored method has been evaporation ponds. However, constructing new evaporation ponds becomes an expensive proposition, as it may require the removal of several acres of vineyard. For wineries in areas where vineyard land is not as valuable, urban encroachment is making that evaporation of high organic wastes and their attendant odors make this an unacceptable practice. The salts found in winery waste waters, especially potassium, prevent repeated use of winery water for irrigation. Winesecrets has filters that replace high-salt processes such as ion exchange, and will ultimately be part of the solution as wineries seek to recycle and reuse clean water in the rapidly approaching future.
We offer solids filters with permanent membranes as a replacement to all of the methods which rely on disposable filter media. Disposable filter media becomes solid waste, and as much as 2% of the wine being filtered is thrown out with the filter media. The new class of filters, known collectively as “cross-flow” filters eliminate the solid waste, and also, recover all of the resources we’ve talked about, including land, water, electricity, and waste water that were used to make the wine that previously went into the trash.