With Blended Tech, Trial Blends Have Never Been Easier

The art of wine blending is where the skills of the finest winemakers truly shine. However, while taste is often the primary factor in determining blends, there’s also a broader picture to consider that can have significant business implications. Each blending component is often unique and may vary in terms of variety, origin, chemistry, and production costs. Depending on the intended sales channel, some or all of these elements may be crucial to the commercial success of the finished wine. 

After speaking with hundreds of winemakers, we’ve found that conducting blend trials is one of the most common workflows still performed with a spreadsheet. This still holds true even if the winery uses winemaking software! 

The complexity of the spreadsheet can certainly vary from the use of macros to simple formulas, but the process is roughly the same. The team must collect information about blend components, input the various blends being trialed, and then double-check the results. Doing this once or twice isn’t so bad. But, as the variations grow and more blends are created, it can quickly become a time-consuming process with a high potential for costly mistakes. 

The Trial Blends Feature

Trial Blends is just one feature designed to help winemaking teams make more informed decisions with less effort. Since Blended already knows everything about your wines, simply tell us what you’re blending and we’ll simulate the important characteristics of the proposed blends. 

For a given sample size, we calculate how much you need to add of each component, and sum them up so you know how much you have to pull from your lots.

For each trial blend, we show you the important characteristics of the blend. To ensure compliance with label requirements, we show you the overall composition: 

• AVA

• County

• State

• Variety

• Clone

• Vintage

More Than Basic Blend Data

If you’ve entered cost information, we show a cost breakdown of each blend – something that can be very helpful, if for example you’re trying to create a price-conscious wine but you’re using large percentages of expensive lots to compose it.

We also make predictions about the important chemistry measurements of the blended wine:

• Alcohol

• free/molecular/total SO2

• pH (which is not just a simple average but calculates free H+ ion concentration)

• RS (residual sugar)

• TA (titratable acidity), and 

• VA (volatile acidity)

See Blended Tech in Action

Interested in learning how else we’re modernizing winemaking software? Contact us today to get a demo of our Trial Blends feature and all the other ways Blended Technologies can help you work smarter, not harder.