Stent's machine to heart of wine

Winemakers' grape selection has been brought into the 21st century thanks to a French machine being used for the first time in Hawke's Bay by Paritua Vineyards.

The $200,000 Bucher Vaslin system uses camera technology to individually inspect and select grapes at a rate of up to 9000 tonnes an hour.

Paritua winemaker Jason Stent said it was a "very useful tool".

"You are never going to make good wine unless you have good grapes," he said.

"We are getting only the berries we like into the ferment and enjoying the results."

He said the machine gave him the ability to make good wine even though a batch of grapes might initially appear disappointing.

"If we have a mediocre batch we can still select some very good grapes, even if most are downgraded.

"It makes the winemakers' choice more precise and gives us more options.

"We can ferment it as it is, or put it through the machine again and do another selection from a batch - it gives us more strings to our bow.

"The more colours we have to paint with, the better the wine will be."

Viniquip marketing manager Horst Klos said the Bucher Vaslin machine was "complex but user-friendly".

Destemmed grapes were loaded onto a conveyer that propelled them under a camera which made split-second decisions using the winemaker's criteria.

The rejected grapes were blown onto a different conveyer by 100 micro air jets.

"You can continuously look on the machine and see the photo shots being taken by the camera and isolate the individual items you want - and you can do that on the spot," Mr Klos said.

Mr Stent said this season had been mixed for the vineyard, helped along with their new machine.

"It has been a very difficult season but some of the later varieties, cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon, have had some pretty benign weather lately and the fruit has come through beautifully, with good sugars and fantastic colour and flavour.

"I'm really surprised at the high quality. We are down on volume but we are probably up there on quality - but the final analysis will be once the wine is made. But it's looking pretty good."