Wineries generate significant amounts of wastewater. Most of that wastewater is generated during the crush process, from spillage and water used for sanitation and press cleaning, but additional wastewater is also created when washing harvested grapes prior to crushing. Ongoing operations such as tank washing and Clean in Place (CIP) also create tremendous amounts of wastewater.

Operations that discharge to sewer systems can face significant and ever-growing discharge fees, and the conditions that allow high-quality wine grapes to thrive requires a significant amount of water for irrigation. Water scarcity continues to be a serious issue for all types of vineyards, while water costs continue to increase and can often make or break a winery’s bottom line.

Our beverage processing water management solutions can help you to increase profitability by reducing your wastewater treatment costs, protecting and improving the performance of expensive downstream processes, increasing your by-product recapture, and helping you to reuse your water faster and more efficiently.

Your water could help save you money. Contact our experts to find out how.

The high sugar content of grapes leads to winery wastewater with incredibly high Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), and Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD). Additionally, organic materials such as skins, stems, seeds, and pulp lead to effluent with elevated Total Suspended Solids (TSS). We’ve tested winery raw wastewater containing COD as high as 13,500 mg/L—and it can be much higher.

To use wastewater for irrigation purposes, a COD of less than 150 mg/L is typically desired. Ultrafine screening, with or without the use of downstream Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF) systems, effectively removes high levels of TSS, BOD and COD to provide irrigation-quality water that can be recycled and reused for growing.

Due to winery wastewater’s extreme levels of BOD and COD most larger wineries treat their own wastewater streams on site. Simple screening systems are used to capture some of the larger particles prior to being sent to primary clarification, though more capital-intensive systems such as aeration ponds/lagoons and aerobic digesters are often needed—and these can be costly and energy-intensive.

All vineyards can benefit by reducing the load sent to their lagoon treatment cells. Aeration diffusers can’t operate effectively when smothered by solids, which forces blowers and compressors to use more energy and necessitates more frequent tank cleaning; fine screening can remove those solids upstream to preserve your capacity and reduce your energy and maintenance costs.

After crush, wineries have a tremendous amount of stems, seeds, and pulp that enters wastewater systems. An effective screening system captures and removes those solids, preventing them from overloading downstream treatment processes and enabling wineries to recycle the organic material as fertilizer or to create new revenue streams by selling captured by-products on to secondary producers.

Wine producers should identify systems that output compact, dry waste solids, as those will be much more cost effective to handle, dispose of or repurpose.