Come next Tuesday, we’ll be bottling the 2010 Curly Flat Chardonnay. Before we bottle, we currently filter the Chardonnay using Cross Flow Filtration technology. The reasons we choose this filter type are two-fold. Firstly, it is non-oxidative as the vertical columns which contain the filtering medium are enclosed and air tight, so no air can exist internally in the filter. This significantly reduces the risk of oxidation and therefore maintains the integrity of the wine. Some filtration methods can be quite oxidative as the filtering medium can be exposed to the air. Also conventional filtering can tend to be wasteful as wine is left behind in the filtering medium. This leads to the second reason we use Cross Flow. It’s very efficient as the enclosed filter membrane self cleans as it goes which keeps wine losses to an absolute minimum.
Curly Flat Vineyard 