Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/670021
7 0 V I N E YA R D & W I N E RY M A N A G E M E N T | M a y - J u n e 2 016 w w w. v w m m e d i a . c o m ed as vinoBRETT for Brettanomyces and vinoPAL for Pediococcus and Lactobacillus. "Veriflow uses a ther- mocycler about the size of a football that brings molecular diagnostics to labs at a fraction of the price of the larger PCR units," says Carter. "Invisible Sentinel is the company that developed this technology, and while the company is in many other industries, the vinoBRETT technol- ogy is relatively new. The advantag- es are that you get results in about four hours, and this testing is more compatible with younger wines than PCR, which lets producers be more proactive as soon as fermentation is complete. We see customers using this testing to ensure wines are clean before going into barrel (for the first time or after racking) as well as ensuring that topping wines are free of Brettanomyces to avoid cross-contamination." NEW TECHNOLOGIES "In larger commercial labs world- wide, there are exciting things hap- pening," says Burns. "There are new analytical technologies, and instrumentation is evolving at an exponential pace. Over the last 12 to 15 years, we've gone through six generations and iterations of GC-MS [gas chromatography mass spectrometry]. As the instrumenta- tion gets better, accuracy gets bet- ter and reportable concentrations get lower every two or three years. We have more than 12 GC-MS machines in our lab, so it can be expensive to keep up to date." "Another interesting technology is MS-MS, where we take one MS and follow it with another," contin- ues Burns. The way we most fre- quently use MS isn't the traditional way, which is to identify unknown compounds, but as a selective detector. We can take the com- plex matrix of wine and use it as a filter to look only at compounds of interest. This is hugely important because it allows the development of practical analyses previously only available in the research laborato- ries, such as low-level methoxypyr- azines, and also looking at matrices important to winemaking that we ETS analyst Sedonia Yoshida prepares primers and reagents for Scorpions analysis, which uses rapid genetic detection to give winemakers precise insights into a range of spoilage microbes so they can act before a wine is contaminated. For more information contact your sales representative or email us at info@seguinmoreau.com ICONE RANGE