New technique promises to speed sparkling wine production.

There’s no mistaking a gyro­palette at work, its top-heavy robotic arm twirling a wire pal­ette of bottles like a baton. But you’ll need a scanning elec­tron microscope to see the iron nanoparticles that have the poten­tial to make it obsolete.

The early adoption of the robotic gyropalette by Cava producer Cor­doniu in the mid-1970s was a mile­stone that altered the course of the modern sparkling wine indus­try. Mechanized riddling reduced the amount of time required to move spent yeasts cells into the neck of a bottle from two months to a matter of days, all without any adverse effects on the sensory qualities of the wine.

The wholesale adoption of mechanization by traditional-meth­od sparkling wine producers and many Champenoise dramatically reduced the production costs and time to market imposed by the labor-intensive technique of hand-riddling bottles. As such, bottle-aged sparkling wine became a viable and affordable alternative to still wine.

Almost despite technology, this time-honored method remains very close to its original form. Beyond the gyropalette and the technical advances in still wine production that have contributed to the overall quality of sparkling wine, innovation in the traditional method of pro­duction has remained focused on further reducing the time required for riddling – specifically, by modi­fying the forms of yeast inoculum used in secondary fermentation.  Read the entire article here – Magnetic riddling