Although we are not bottling this week, both Red, White, & Blue and Star Spangled White are being filtered to get them ready.
We filter all of our wines using a cross-flow filter. Our cross-flow filter has four large cylinders that are approximately six inches in diameter and five feet in length. Inside each cylinder are about 2200 spaghetti-sized tubes made of polyolefin. The polyolefin is porous in addition to being hollow. The unfiltered wine is pumped up from the bottom of the cylinder in all of the tubes and the filtered wine then comes through the pores. The filtered wine falls by gravity down inside the cylinders but outside the tubes and is pumped to a receiving tank. Unfiltered wine is pumped all the way to the top of the cylinder and is returned to the bottom for another trip up one of the tubes. Since the pores in the tubes are approximately 0.24 microns and a yeast cell is about 3–4 microns in diameter, filtration using a cross-flow filter eliminates the possibility of a yeast cell remaining in the wine. The result is very clear, almost polished, wine.
