CAT | Swartland
The most important thing in a winery is not the press, destemmer, pump, or any other piece of equipment you use. It’s not even the kind of barrels you carefully choose…. the most important thing in a winery is probably the floors! They must be solid, stable, drain easily, or otherwise you spend your whole life cleaning them. We’ll get to earthy topics soon, but today we started installing another important item – the Cooling.
Fortunately the building we’ve taken over has pretty good insulation, but in the middle of Summer, Riebeek gets pretty warm, and the building still warms to the low 20’s Celsius. Ideally we’d want the temperature to be 16 Celsius and below, so we have to install some serious cooling to bring the large volume of air down. We can’t simply install air-conditioners as they dry the air out, and this leads to increased evaporation of water from the wine maturing in barrel causing us to lose wine, and increasing the alcohol content at the same time.
Offloading Chiller
To combat this we are installing a water based chilling system that will keep the humidity relatively high.
It’s a large, costly system to install, but a vital one!
After two and a half years of searching, we’ve finally found a Swartland home for our wines! Headquarters will from now on be at No. 1 Short Street, Riebeek Kasteel.
The building has for the last few years been run as a Hardware store, but we’ve always thought it would be a perfect winery, and have been working on the owners to let us take it over as our home base.
No. 1 Short Street, Riebeek Kasteel
Finally they agreed, and the next few weeks will see us making a few upgrades to the building – mostly to the insulation, cooling and electrics. We’re also building a store for our wine library, and we hope to have moved in by Christmas!
