A step in the right direction: sustainable winemaking with amaea targeted filtration
“Factors like waste prevention and reuse are key opportunities for saving money and taking iterative steps toward more sustainable operations.”
Torey Arvik, VP Applied Research
Consumers want more transparency about the products they consume as they make personal efforts to try to influence sustainability. Businesses are working to adopt new methods to meet the goals of their customers, but what is “sustainability”, and how can a winery make an impact? First, stay in business. Then, take steps to improve every day.
Sustainability in operations
Recently, we shared several technical articles on winemaking applications to using targeted filtration, replacing the need for some additives and additional processing steps. Molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) filtration treatments give winemakers more control over some critical, fine-tuning applications while decreasing costs and solid waste generation.
The costs (or savings) of changing typical processes are not always easy to identify. MIP technology offers the winemaker a new set of applications in hard-to-treat situations, like removal of pyrazines, smoke impacts, and ethyl phenols, as well as polyphenol (catechins) fining. All without the need for specialized or expensive additives that add to production time. MIP treatments add predictability and greatly decrease the volume of solid waste generated from typical processes of finishing a wine for bottling.
There are other hidden and hard to quantify financial and sustainability benefits to using MIPs as part of your process. Standard protocols exist to treat common issues associated with preparing wines for packaging. Since most wineries make several wines each vintage, and each vineyard can offer its own challenges, there are a lot of things to consider.
MIP treatment can eliminate the need for some commonly used additives and ingredients like oak chips, activated carbon, polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVPP), silica gel, isinglass, pork gelatine, or pea protein, further decreasing inputs, their shipping costs, and their associated carbon footprint.
The decreased labor and associated health and safety risks of using additives in the cellar are just as important. Not having allergens in the winery makes your food safety plan much easier to document. Not needing extra training or personal protective equipment (PPE) are a bonus.
Using MIPs and targeted filtration, you don’t make additions and there are no lees to manage at the bottom of a tank, like there is after a conventional fining. That means more of your wine stays in the tank, and you avoid liquid losses. Currently, as much as 10% of wine loss due to fining is accepted as part of doing business. Now most of that loss can be avoided with MIP technology.
Since input costs and loss prevention are arguably the top two drivers of cost savings in winemaking, using MIPs makes good financial sense in many cases. Factors like waste prevention and reuse are key opportunities for saving money and taking iterative steps toward more sustainable operations. Sustainable practices need to work for the business and the consumer.
Iterative improvement, not overnight change
So, what does sustainability mean to your business and your customer? Consumers are trying to make an impact in slowing climate change and buying responsibly. “Think globally, act locally” is the mantra and consumers are looking for companies that have a similar view.
There are over 70 wine related sustainability certification standards globally1. All of them share the same universal tenets:
Protect the environment
Value water
Reduce waste
Be a good neighbor and employer
Maintain a long-term thriving business
So how can producers make improvements to processes that satisfy consumers’ desires? Wineries around the world continue to respond to environmental concerns by lightweighting glass, increasing recyclable packaging use, and making wine with low intervention processes and eco-friendly ingredients. Every sustainability effort helps, and this is where MIP technology can have an iterative impact for your winery.
Standard winemaking processes have changed very little since the 1970’s. They were adopted as part of a modernization effort to optimize volume and quality, but they require relatively large external inputs, and a lot of energy. To be sustainable, these processes need to be the opposite. New processes that work alongside existing tanks, like amaea’s targeted filtration, can generate meaningful outcomes with less waste and greater control.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Where I have previously shared applications for wine treatments (see other articles about MIPs and different applications), now, we’re exploring how the process can help increase sustainability for your winery.
Take polyphenol fining for example. MIPs can selectively target and remove things, like catechins, to make the finished wine more palatable, without dramatic changes to mouthfeel. The selective filtration process can greatly simplify and streamline the fining process. This avoids the need to purchase single-use fining agents, like silica gel, animal-based gelatine or pea proteins, to soften the profile of the wine.
The methods used to target catechins and other bitter things can be more selective without the added organoleptic effects those other additives can bring to your wine. MIPs are subtractive and can be very selective, depending on the treatment protocol the winemaker elects to apply. That means greater control over the process, fewer additions, and using MIPs supports a vegan label claim.
By applying reusable MIPs, we can eliminate a lot of the inputs that, in the end, react and become winery waste. We can also eliminate a few extra tank washes, and the labor associated with them, saving some water in the process.
What’s the secret? MIPs are a reuseable polymer media that can be regenerated with ethanol and used again, thousands of times. This means MIPs are much more sustainable over their lifetime than single-use additives.
Work in the lab at amaea has yet to show an end to the selective filtration media’s useful life (see the life cycle testing chart, below). Briefly, scientists put batches of MIP made years ago through regular life cycle testing to evaluate their effective end of life, using test solutions containing a thousand times more target molecule than is typically found in a wine. This above-and-beyond testing is meant to establish a robust reusable performance record over time. The MIPs get cleaned after each cycle and are evaluated for the percent recovery of the compounds.
This rigorous testing gives amaea scientists the confidence that the MIPs retain their selective nature permanently. This means that if there is no external fouling of the media, the MIPs just keep working to remove targeted compounds. The stability and reusability of MIPs means that no new MIPs need to be created for a very long time.
Total phenols binding over time
Chart 1. Life cycle testing with ppm concentrations of volatile phenols (syringol, 4-ethyl phenol, 4-ethyl guaiacol and guaiacol) over the last three years. 400 cycles have been completed to date. The data shows every 40th data point from the rolling average, after every 20 cycles. Data extrapolation demonstrates the potential for thousands of cycles with very high recovery rates.
Recyclability is an absolute requirement for sustainable processes and a future circular economy. For example, we are an increase of durable and reusable consumer packaging at cafes and restaurants, as well as in the marketplace, since reusability promotes economic and environmental sustainability again and again. Steel and aluminum cans have historically been two of the best examples of recyclability. The energy required to make new cans from recycled ones is one-tenth of that required for making new ones from ore. MIPs are the same in that they can be regenerated and reused thousands of times.
We use food-grade ethanol to regenerate the MIPs after each use. About 90% of that ethanol has the potential to be cleaned, redistilled and reused. As we continue to move toward more sustainable processes, we are working with ethanol providers who can recycle it.
Dreaming bigger, the compounds that we wash from the MIPs often have value as well. One day, our hope is that the compounds, like catechins and anthocyanins recovered from the targeted filtration process, can be repurposed as nutraceuticals or even make it back into other wines as naturally derived enological additives.
Sustainability is about balance and applying the right efforts where you can in iterative steps. When thinking about sustainability in winemaking, we must consider that business needs should be supported by environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies. Ignoring one of the aspects of sustainability tends to pass the burden on to other parts of the business, leading to short-lived ambitions and false starts.
Spending less money on single-use additives from the other side of the world may be helpful for some wine programs, while changing processes to eliminate the added costs and waste generated might benefit others. Ultimately, consumers want to know what’s in their wine and how it was made. They also want to know if the brand they are supporting is authentically interested in sustainable practices. Targeted filtration is an iterative step that goes a long way toward the goal of less waste and cleaner winemaking, with fewer external inputs.
Author: Torey Arvik, VP of Applied Research