One of the charms of wine is that every vintage tastes different. Because wine is also used as an investment vehicle these days leads to all kinds of speculation about prices every year. In that light, 2020 is a much-discussed wine year. According to certain connoisseurs it was a top year, others believe it was is a year we had better write on our bellies. - TEXT ILJA GORT
One thing is certain: it was a difficult year in Bordeaux. A spring that was far too wet, combined with hailstorms at the beginning of summer. Led to grapes not ripening simultaneously. A minor disaster, because that means that by harvest time, one side of the same bunch of grapes is sweet and ripe. And the other still sour and green. What you would wish for as a winemaker then is a bunch of industrious pickers, gently humming grape by grape to pick the green berries from the bunches. An ideal that, both financially and logistically, will remain a dream shrouded in pink shreds of fog for me.
More and more chateaus are switching to the TriO
But for some years now, there has been a solution to this: the Tri Optique, a sorting machine that filters out anything you don't want in your a harvest. After the bunches of grapes have been picked. And stripped of their stalks in the wine cellar with the égrappoir, the loose grapes fall onto a table vibrante, a moving vibrating belt that vibrates out some of the twigs, leaves and insects. Then the grapes roll into the Tri Optique. There, they are filmed with a linear colour camera. Those images are transmitted at lightning speed to a computer that 'makes a judgement based on the position and correlation of the pixels in relation to each other'. In other words, thanks to the shape detector and the colour scanner, all faulty grapes are ruthlessly recognised and kicked out. Any remaining insects, leaves, twigs and other unwanted strangers are also caught and forcefully blown off the belt by a hydraulic system.
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