What’s New at ENOTOOLS

Every person who has ever sold barrels which are not currently in your cellar will paint a beautiful picture of what their barrels can do for you: Fame, riches, six- pack abs, etc.

Reality is that there is a point where saving money on barrels is counterproductive. Amortize the delivered cost of that barrel over a five year period divided by the number of bottles which it produces. A $1275 (delivered) barrel with a five year lifespan costs you $ 0.88/ bottle. For a savings of $ 0.24 a bottle, is a lackluster barrel really saving you anything?

What happens when you tell the customer, "That wine needs to lay down" because the oak is sharp, overbearing, unintegrated burlap and smoke mixed with green sap and burnt marshmallow? I'm exaggerating on purpose to make a point. I have passed on wine purchasing opportunities when I felt like the oak was driving and I had no idea where we were going before. I can't be alone in that.

A barrel makes a good change, no change, or a bad change. Do yourself a favor and use your barrel budget on fewer, higher quality barrels. You could buy one or two GREAT barrels, and use some sticks in your neutral barrels while making a better product than a cellar full of average, inconsistent, harsh, crappy barrels ever will.

If you are bored and want to talk barrels, let us know!

Amorim is manufacturing the majority of all of the wine closures you can buy in the U.S. Many popular sources of cork are selling corks made elsewhere. Not Amorim. Amorim sells what Amorim makes.

Yep. That explains it.

I act on behalf of Amorim Cork America, gathering information, taking an active role to bring about a result. I take action and provide service.

Enotools is not a reseller, distributor, or middleman for corks. We sell you closures at Amorim's price. And with our portfolio of products, we can save you a lot of time on other things, too.

Buy Amorim Corks direct when you buy through Enotools!

If you could process your grapes with only two workers on the crushpad, would you? Welcome to Life with a Carlsen & Associates Crushpad Package.

With machines designed to work together, small touches like compatible heights, complimentary speed ranges, tandem starts and stops, etc. can mean the difference between two people handling ten tons of grapes/ hour on your crushpad or not.

Imagine one person weighing bins and dumping fruit from a rotating head forklift into a receiving hopper with the gentlest auger available to delicately deliver grapes to the destemmer or the press.

Person number two is in charge of monitoring the speeds at which grapes or must are being processed/ moved and deciding when to cart away the waste bin at the end of the destemmer, when to run the press pan pump, when to pause to switch tanks/ fermenters, etc. The attendant on the crush pad has it easy once the speeds are set and the job is mainly just watching levels.

Using our receiving hopper is a bit like having a dump station or accumulation table on the bottling line. The grapes are spread across the interval of the auger and delivered to the destemmer or press like water from a hose. Nailing down the flow rate of the grapes to the height- adjustable destemmer delivers the best possible result when the destemmer is then dialed in for that fruit. With the standard legs on our Vega 10 destemmer, we can destem directly to bins or into our must pumping system and (with more laborers) onto a sorting table. Using the hopper and destemmer together will achieve 90% of what sorting will, so that one is on you. Surely, there is another way to increase the overall quality of the wine by a small margin which will cost less than tripling your labor expense? If not, we sell that system, too! For now, back to the two- person crush pad.

Pumping must only when necessary to decrease labor is best done by the strongest/ gentlest must pumping system on the planet. Yes, that is Carlsen's Waukesha 130 with its wing rotor equipped head quick- coupled to the must sump. Thirty percent air in the 3" must hose is desired and is proof that we move must with a change of air pressure; Not by mechanical violence.

If pumping crushed whites through the axial feed of our press, we do this with the door open so that we may get a chance to see the level and decide when to rotate away some free run, which goes straight into the press pan/ pumpover sump provided with our presses.

Fermented reds can be pumped back to our press with the Waukesha or dumped from bins into our receiving hopper to feed into the press.

All of our presses are built to our spec and come stock with a discharge height which is perfect for removing pomace with 1/2 ton bins.

Enotools services and sells the machines provided by Carlsen & Associates which enable you to preserve the quality of your fruit with a series of machines designed to be easy to clean and work very well by themselves, but really shine together.

Rest assured that our parts are available in the U.S. because Carlsen builds more equipment for the wine industry in the U.S. than the competition.

You are getting tight on time! Contact us for more info.

You read that right. Buy one or one truckload of tanks for your winery, freight is just $100.00 until 2/29/2020.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Contact Amy Stuckey today!!!!!

You may be enduring a love/ hate relationship with your destemmer to the extent that you are contemplating an upgrade by this next harvest?

Too often, when we consult on wine grape processing equipment, there is a degree of doubt when we start the discussion by asking how the grapes arrive at the winery. How do they arrive? 1/2 ton bins? Lugs? Gondola trailer?

This is a really important question. Your destemmer can be a new, commercial grade, well- built, gentle, and easy to clean destemmer like our Vega series of destemmers. But it may also be a viscous beast that is less than gentle than what we consider modern? Maybe it could be improved upon? Maybe it's the way it's being fed which could make the most difference?

The truth is that when you deliver a constant, metered flow of grapes to any destemmer, you preserve more of the quality of what was on the vine. You will see less stem material, more whole berries, and less wasted fruit stuck to the rakus in the bin if you can nail down the flow rate of grapes coming in.

Meet the American made, Carlsen Receiving Hoppers:

So you see, it is easy to improve the performance of any destemmer. You also gain safety and preserve quality. Some functional flexibility for the operation in the ability to feed whole cluster or fermented reds to press are built in.

Ask for a quote today!

Just a reminder-
While we at Enotools and Carlsen do not pretend to be willing to establish the SOP's for sanitizing your facility, I want to remind you of something:
The Waukesha might want a fresh set of o-rings right now.

Not a "lobe pump", the positive displacement, "winged rotor" design of your Waukesha pump is such that the small, low cost ($28 +/-) o- rings in your pump head take about 20-40 minutes to replace with a thorough cleaning of the parts inside the head.

Why now? With all of the solids you have potentially pumped through the last few months, it will give you peace of mind that your sanitizing rinse and intelligent storage before and after use is effective. And your o- ring seals are a consumable. They will wear out. And the pump will develop a drip.

A few drips an hour from a pump capable of 80 PSI at 1RPM while introducing the least amount of dissolved oxygen and keeping solids or turbidity increases to a bare minimum is not the end of the world. But it is annoying. And it's the only way this pump has to tell you that it's time.

My advice is to set it up as an annual chore to be done as part of the care and feeding of the best pump on the planet.

Look for instructions on how to replace the Waukesha pump seals here.

Order your seals here.

Wauk On!

Amorim Cork was the first to market with individualized quality control screening technology for natural cork stoppers with a non-detectable TCA guarantee*.

I do a lot of driving. I love my job. I think about my job while I drive. When I think about my job, I think about corks. When I think about corks, I think about my manufacturer and their competition.

The unavoidable hazard of being the one to beat in any context is imitation. The entire cork industry knows that Amorim is the one to beat. When you are the best, you expect this and have experienced it more than once. It's true in anything.

The limitation in imitation (see what I did there?) is the inability to recreate the exact recipe. You can't make your uncle's ribs or your grandma's spaghetti sauce. And our competitors do not sell an Amorim cork.

On my latest drive, I decided that Amorim's business must be doing well, because I feel like whenever we go to a trade show or convention, I hear the same talking points that we use come out of the mouths of our competitors; Not that I would eavesdrop, of course! No way ;-) I shudder to think what the competition claims while in a private discussion with a customer. Don't get me wrong- I know that a few of our competitors are doing what I think must be a good job. Some of the other cork companies are offering a good product. And I can assure you first hand that Amorim is as professional any organization from the top down as you will find in any industry (this isn't my first). And as such, they do not engage in "fudging" or circulating propaganda. We don't need to embellish.

After 30 years being wine industry aware (Vinwoke?), 16 years as a self- employed vendor, and 12 years a partner with Amorim, I have learned a lot about wine and closures and what people are willing to do and say to sell their wares. Sales is a deep and narrow trench where weakness leads to a quick death; While dishonesty leads to a slow death. And trying to look cool by putting someone else down might be cathartic/ therapeutic but is generally unproductive. And the hardest things to sell in the beverage industry are barrels and corks.

Why is it hard to sell corks? It's a product from nature which requires the customer to have some level of interest in tradition, sustainability, and learning why "Company A" has a better process than "Company B-Z". And you have to earn the customer's trust. A lot is riding on that cork. And everyone swears that their manufacturer is the best. But who among them can say to you that they sell a specific type of cork that is so good that you WILL NOT detect TCA from a cork in any of your wines under that cork?

Enter The Guarantee.

Outlined in our sales agreement (contact us for a copy) is the definition of our guarantee on NDTech corks. In so many (this blog post is not a contract) words: If you did have a viable claim against NDTech closures, you would be reimbursed for the wine in question at the invoice price*.

We have closures at every price point for every beverage. And we offer the highest quality and the best guarantee. This can only come from a company the size of Amorim. With a little homework, your confidence in your closures could go up a lot. And you have enough to worry about.

Read the fine print. Buy from the best. Order from Enotools.

* See Amorim sales agreement for details.

Shipping directly from Napa, our packaging supplies for Sparkling Wine Production are second to none. Why not make it easy for yourself and get prices for all three in one email?

Corks and Wire Hoods for BEER available, too!

Contact us today!!!!

You may well know that the portion of the sparkling cork which does the heavy lifting is the cylindrical portion. I have witnessed the body of Amorim's sparkling corks being made. The quality control is impressive and the pressure tolerance of his closure far exceeds that of your glass.

To keep it easy on your budget, Amorim is now offering through ENOTOOLS the Spark Top One. Just one disc on the bottom is all it takes to save the quality and the money- Just what you are looking for!

Order yours here.