Our Crushpad System is designed for wineries with a mindset of utmost respect for the fruit, saving cleaning time, avoiding down time, and saving labor.
Your grape processing equipment should respect your grapes and let you deliver an expression of place and varietal character that's unique to your wines. If harsher machines are used, more corrective measures are needed, and they mask the wines' uniqueness.
If you could work less, do more, and go home earlier during harvest, wouldn't you?
It All Starts with a Hopper (or a Belt)
The first piece of crush equipment your grapes see should be a receiving hopper or an incline belt conveyor. Take the Carlsen 6' horizontal receiving hopper: Adjustable from 65 to 105" discharge height and designed for dumping half-ton bins on the fly, it supplies a constant, metered feed to the destemmer, so you can dial in the perfect rotation speed. It also comes in handy when feeding the press whole cluster fruit or fermented reds dumped from bins.
There's much debate over receiving methods and whether an auger harms fruit. Ours is flight-edged and oversized to eliminate pressure on the bunches. There's no pinch zone between the floor and the screw, and no end bearing to create a stem knot. It's gentler than hand-raking fruit out of a bin, and far more efficient than dumping lugs by hand. Prefer a belt? The Carlsen incline belt conveyor is the alternative when fruit has to be raked in, or add it alongside the hopper to lift fruit to the press or fermentor. More on hoppers and conveyors.
Then the Destemmer Crusher
A household name in crush equipment, the Puleo Vega series is one of the quietest, most durable and most versatile destemmers on the market, rated from 1 to 80 tons per hour. The included stand adjusts to work over half-ton bins, 1-ton bins, a must pump or a sorting table. Speed is set by a frequency drive, not a pulley and knob that wears out, and the waste is easy to collect in half-ton macro bins. More on destemmers.
Time to Pump Must?
The must sump couples with the Waukesha to make the most gentle mechanized way of moving crushed or destemmed grapes to a press or fermentor. Half of this system sits idle part of the year while the other half earns its keep year-round, since the Waukesha becomes your go-to pump for transfers, pumpovers, racking, bottling and barrel topping. We have professionally tested numbers showing the lowest solids, the most whole berries and the fewest broken seeds of any mechanized must transfer. More on must pumping.
The Most Pressing Issue
"A press is a press," says Jim Carlsen, founder of Carlsen & Associates. Our competitors would have you believe otherwise. Don't overpay for a press that's partly mild steel or comes with a very complex system for lengthening your day. Crush equipment has to work once a year. It's like pulling a car out of the barn and driving 3,000 miles at full speed. Can yours do that?
The press is arguably the biggest money maker in the crush equipment world. What else can you point to and see liquid gold coming out of? It also has the least to do with overall wine quality, unless it breaks. Ours has 12 programs of 12 steps each that can be paused, modified or aborted at any time, and three ways to control it: automatic, touch-pad manual and true manual.
Our service sells our press. Closed tank, open tank or basket is your call. Our basket press is 100% American made, our bladder presses have sixteen years of being built our way, and every press comes with the screened press pan (which doubles as a pumpover sump) and arrives at bin height, at no extra charge. You'll be trained on your press, including how to get it clean with very little water. More on presses.
Still Deciding?
Whatever the size or type of equipment you need, Carlsen and ENOTOOLS are happy to build it into a Crushpad Package. Ask us for wineries near you running our equipment, or read our guide, How to Buy Winery Equipment.