Visiting an industrial winery is an eye-opening experience. The scale is awesome, stunning really. The process and equipment are totally different from those at wineries to which most people are accustomed.

With massive production volumes come many challenges. Every aspect of winemaking needs to be re-thought and re-engineered. And I’m not talking about additives, interventionist winemaking and the like that you might expect. I’m talking about very fundamental things.

How do you move that many grapes? How do you sort them? When you have an insanely large fermentation tank, how do you keep temperatures under control? What do you do with a gazillion tons of grape must? The list goes on and on.

I came away impressed. I was amazed not just by the scale, but with the level of quality and consistency that is maintained. The focus on those things, the attention to detail and continual efforts to improve were inspiring.

In between equipment-ogling and question-asking, I took pictures. Many were just for my reference and not too exciting. I thought these were pretty cool though, showing not just function but form.

A depth finder in the form of a heavy ball on a reel of metal tape. When your fermentation tanks are massive, you need one of these to know how deep the juice is.

The volume of wine and water that need to be moved at a huge industrial winery requires a network of large diameter pipes.

I like the braided hose on this fitting, and the beads of condensation.

I love the form and shadows here. But this isn’t just any set of stairs on a wall. They are just part of the staircase on a wine storage tank. It holds half-a-million gallons, more than the combined annual production of twenty 10,000 case wineries. If you drank the equivalent of one bottle a day out of this tank, after a full year you’d have dropped its level by just one inch. There were quite a few of these tanks. And there was one much, much bigger.

Safety first! Everyone at the winery has to wear a hard hat, except in the office areas. And the winery is so large, workers need bicycles to get around efficiently.

Copyright Fred Swan 2016, an earlier version was previously published at NorCalWine. All rights reserved.