Production Protocols in Blended

Blended’s wine production software introduces the idea of a Production Protocol, which encapsulates the steps you commonly go through when making a given wine in a particular style – how you process the fruit at the crush pad, what sorts of measurements you take and additions you make, what your procedures are before and after fermentation, and so on. This isn’t to say that the protocol is a recipe, because it isn’t – in a Blended production protocol, any of the steps are optional, and you’re free to take any action that’s not in the protocol at any time. The purpose it serves is to take the things that you commonly do as a winemaker, put them at your fingertips in the UI, and help you see at a glance what you’ve done with your lots and what’s left to do. If you’ve ever worked with a consulting winemaker who has helped you develop process sheets for the different varieties you’re fermenting, with processing steps and addition schedules, then consider this the digital version of that.

A production protocol could include fruit processing steps including sorting, destemming, crushing, taking brix and pH measurements from the field and instructing a sample to be pulled for a juice panel, adding SO2, transferring to a tank for fermentation, adding yeast and nutrients, taking daily temperature and brix measurements and doing punchdowns, pressing to barrel when fermentation is complete, etc. If there are steps you don’t do in your winemaking, omit them from the protocol; if there are extra steps or products you use, add them in. The protocol doesn’t force you to do anything, but makes common tasks easier in the UI.

Protocol stages

Blended’s production protocols consist of any number of stages, where a stage represents a phase of the winemaking process where you would like to think about those lots together and work with them side-by-side. It’s an organizational tool that groups lots in each phase together in a tab in the UI. At a minimum, your protocol must have at least one stage, but it can have as many as you like, and your different protocols can have different stages. Most winemakers would probably want protocols to have a stage for fruit processing and pre-fermentation (e.g. cold soak), a stage for active fermentation, and a stage for aging. In the UI you will see tabs in the production section for each of those stages, with an extra tab to see all lots in the system, like this:

But if it suits your workflow better, you could have stages in fermentation for wines close to dryness, or wines in extended maceration. You could separate wines undergoing malolactic fermentation from those in post-ML aging. Wines that you are getting ready for bottling could have their own stage, where you can track their progress through blending, clarification and fining, cold stabilization, and final chemistry.

Another way to think of these stages is that they serve the function of reports, which let you see at a glance a portion of your lots of interest, except instead of a static report, these stages are fully interactive in the product and you can use them to organize and carry out your day-to-day work.

Protocol steps

Each stage in a protocol has one or more steps. What is a step? It is a single winemaking task that can be carried out. In Blended, here are the steps that can be added to a protocol:

• Action - any activity where the software records that the action was done, possibly with notes, but doesn’t record any other specialized information for it. These can include processing steps (sorting, destemming, crushing), fermentation management (punchdowns, pumpovers), and miscellaneous (sending a sample to the lab for analysis, stirring lees, etc.). There are some built-in actions or you can create any action you like.
• Addition - adding anything to the wine. You can specify any ingredient, additive, or chemical, choosing from the list or entering your own. You can use categories or product names from materials and the software will link that up to product batches when the addition is recorded. If in the protocol you know the amount to add, as a fixed amount, a concentration, or a measurement target (see the article https://www.blendedtech.com/blog/lot-additions-in-blended), you can enter that in the protocol step, or leave it blank to allow the amount to be entered when the data is recorded.
• Bottling - when the step is carried out, this will kick off the bottling workflow to record the number and sizes of bottles receiving finished wine, and to record any materials used from inventory.
• Measurement - any physical or chemical measurement you can take on a lot of wine. In the protocol, a step can list one or more measurements to take at the same time.
• Press - when the step is carried out, invokes the press workflow to record what happens to the free run and different press cuts
• Saignée - similar to the press workflow, when invoked records what is done with the juice that is bled off.
• Topping - when invoked, starts the topping workflow to record which lots are topped and what wines they’re topped with.
• Transfer - when invoked, starts the transfer workflow to record wine movement from one vessel to another.

A step can be marked as repeating, which means that it’s not something you do just once, but you do on a regular basis, for example, once-per-day punchdowns and temperature/brix measurements during fermentation, or periodic topping during aging.

You can also have composite steps, which contain a number of other steps, and are given a single button in the UI to record them all at once (or add them all to a work order). Examples might include daily cap management during fermentation, which could include a punchdown as well as a temperature/brix measurement, or a racking operation, which would include a transfer out of barrel to a tank, measurements, SO2 adjustment, cleaning of barrels, and transfer back into barrel.

What are protocols used for?

Production protocols serve three purposes. In the UI, they organize your lots together by stage, which lets you look at them together – you can see your pre-fermentation lots in one place, fermenting lots in another, and aging lots separately. If you’re making sparkling wine via secondary fermentation, you can have a dedicated stage for that part of the process. They also give each lot a row of buttons, one for each step in the stage the lot is currently in, as shown here:

You can click on one of those buttons to bring up the workflow to record it, or add it to an in-progress work order. If the step has already been done for that wine (and it’s not a repeating step), the button will be dimmed to show that step is already complete. This is a very convenient way to glance at a list of lots and see what work is done and what’s still left to do.

If your different wines use different production protocols (which you’d probably want to do for your reds and whites, and also for your different varieties if your process differs), you will see different buttons in the production screens according to protocol.

Production protocols serve another important purpose outside of helping drive the UI, and that is to record how you do your winemaking, and through using different protocols for red/white wines, or different grape varieties and styles, to document those subtle differences. You can review your protocols before harvest every year as you’re considering what changes you might want to make with the upcoming vintage, and they provide a great way to document and communicate that knowledge to others as you bring new people to the winemaking team.

Production protocols are one of the most important features of Blended’s platform, and help accommodate how you do your winemaking, so it can flexibly adapt to your needs, helping with your day-to-day work without getting in the way.