Wednesday morning Tom Beard Company delivered the first commercial BlueMorph UV sanitation unit to Jackson Family Wines in Windsor CA, and Co-Founder and Alex Farren, CEO of BlueMorph, was on site to hand it over the to an excited JFW team.
Over the past year Jackson Family Wines have been testing a prototype of the BlueMorph, a cutting edge technology especially designed to use ultraviolet light for tank sanitation, reducing or eliminating the use of water, power, and chemicals.
“At Jackson Family Wines, we are always looking for ways to make our high quality wines with the smallest possible environmental footprint,” said Julien Gervreau, Senior Sustainability Manager at JFW. “Water conservation is a key initiative for us, and finding a technology like BlueMorph that achieves the highest level of tank sanitation without using a drop of water to do so is a major step forward for the industry.”
Exposure to the UV light effectively kills molds and bacteria in the tank, and the BlueMorph works by sliding a 40 pound UV light emitter panel through the door at the bottom of the tank and choosing a preprogrammed emission length based on the size of the tank to ensure a thorough sanitation.
A 55 gallon tank cleans in as little as 6 minutes, while a hundred thousand gallon steel tank takes well over an hour, but with no water usage and very little labor and power.
After an initial demonstration, Cellar Master Dan Bothelo immediately started training his team on the use of the BlueMorph, including how to determine which program to use and the basic safety precautions when dealing with ultraviolet light.
The BlueMorph patented technology is manufactured by Tom Beard Company, and they will be bringing a unit to display at the North Coast Wine Industry Expo where Mark Theis, winemaker for Kendall Jackson will be part of the panel on Conservation, the New Innovation, discussing the BlueMorph and other conservation innovations.
