Tawse Winery

Female: All right, so were up here just a little ways from the wine store, exited to talk to Paul again about the green things that are going on in the winery. We’re enjoying a nice class of Cabernet Franc and one of the question I do want to ask you Paul is what is geothermal and what does geothermal or— Male: Well as you drove up here you will see a great big pond in the winery, it’s a beautiful pond, but it also acts as our heat sink for our geothermal system. So the entire winery is heated during the winter using geothermal, and all of our tanks have a cooling jacket on the back and we use that to cool a wine in order to stabilize it to control the fermentation temperature and that is all chilled down again using geothermal. It’s a very, very efficient way to heat or cool a building, and it is a – The principle is you have a heat pump, which kind of boost the temperature of the liquid in the pipes. In our case it’s a glycol which is an alcohol based liquid and then we pump that into through system either to the floor for heating or to the tanks for cooling. It picks up the heat from the wine in the tank that warms up the liquid. Pumps back out into the pond, the bottom of the pond. It’s cooler than the outside air, so we give off all that heat we picked up into the pond, comeback into the system into the heat pump and we drop the temperature down again by compressing the liquid. Works very similar to how a fridge works except for that back fan coil on your fridge. We have a big pond on the back where all the heat is given away. What we’re doing is we’re basically heating and cooling this winery which is quite large for the cost of burning a few pumps. It’s a little bit electricity but very, very efficient. It’s about 80% more efficient than conventional heating and cooling. Female: So it actually cause you less to do this Male: Much less yes Female: So and it’s better for the environment Male: Much better for the environment, yeah Female: So why do you think there’s not more people may be utilizing this type of… Male: Well I think it’s a more, it’s a much more capital intensive to begin. You know you bring a boiler in a natural gas line and boom you can boil water all day long using natural gas, but there is a direct CO2 emissions from that and it’s not very efficient, so you might have, you know, 20% efficiency when we boil, but now we are getting 80-85% efficiency. So you are using electricity, using the energy much more effectively. Female: So and what else, I know there’s a few other things that makes toss a very sustainable in green winery, what would be those other things be? Male: One of the things that everyone knows, that in the wines business is that you use a lot of water to use wine, and its not because we are trying to water down the wine, but there’s a lot of washing, a lot of cleaning during harvest or washing tanks down everyday. The tanks are big everything has to be spotless. We are washing down all the equipment during harvest, so there’s a lot of water getting used. We’re sitting here on the Niagara’s garden, the only way we put the water back into our sewage systems, so we have a bio filter outside just to the other side of the pond. The bio filter is a bunch of sand beds with plants in them, special plants, and there’s bulrushes and other types of plants. What happens is the water we use, all the grey water we use for washing flow into the bio filter, and it’s cleaned by the plants and the sand, and that water flows back into the pond and we use that pond to water and irrigate all the gardens around the winery, so that the water gets used 3x. Once to clean our tanks, once to go through the bio filter to plants in the bio filter, goes into the pond, so replenished our pond use. Keeps the pond cool so we could use our geothermal system and then we can use that water again to make a place with a great look. Keeping the flowers green, the grass green and a--, so it’s a really, really efficient system, and again you know water is going to be the biggest issue we’re going to be facing in the future with winery. In Australia, it’s already a big issue. Female: Yeah Male: Moving wastewater, for people who don’t have them, they put the wine, all the great waters into a holding tank and then they have to ship that all the way. If these we’re grey water away are very expensive and it’s a very natural way to process that waste. Female: So not only are you reducing, reusing and recycling, but you sort of going to step further to really say, you know what we’re going to take care of the land around us Male: Absolutely Female: And really utilize it to it’s full potential Male: We want to see this past on to generation to generation, you know I live here, I’ve got kids, you know we don’t want to be living in a place that is you know Female: Sustainable Male: Yeah, we want to see it getting better every year not getting worst and then you know I think with farming, we can make you know the land greener, we can make the environment better, or we can make, take the other choice and we can go the other way. We can spray chemicals and we can you know we can more rely on the chemical business so… Female: Excellent, well this Cabs Franc is delicious. I’m exited to go see the seller Male: Great Female: And chat a little bit more. Male: All right. Female: Should we get down there? Male: Let’s go Female: Cheers Male: Cheers