Christie brings creativity to the Palmaz Vineyards winery

This well-known Californian winery uses six M 4K25 RGB projectors Christie to display real-time data from each of the twenty-four fermentation tanks during the winemaking process.

Palmaz Vineyards It is a Californian winery, that extends along 240 hectares in Napa Valley (EU), and has eighteen-story winemaking facilities built in the area's mountains., with an extensive distribution of tunnels excavated underground.

At the heart of the winery is the fermentation dome, which houses twenty-four fermentation tanks on a carousel. The grapes from the vineyards are transported here to be fermented into wine during a delicate and intense sixty-day process..

“It is a complicated process: fermentation is exothermic, what produces heat, so the temperature is constantly adjusted. But it is something that any first-year oenology student can do.. So, Why work with the best winemakers like we already do?? For other things to which you cannot put figures”, states Christian Palmaz, Director of Operations at Palmaz Vineyards.

In this sense, Palmaz wanted to find a balance between creativity necessary to develop their award-winning wines and data to inform the fermentation process. For this they have created a software called Intelligent fermentation logic control system (fermentation intelligence logic control system, FELT) that performs millions of calculations per second from inside each reservoir.

Instead of limiting that huge amount of data to an app on a tablet or desktop computer, Palmaz Vineyards decided to make this information available to its team of winemakers through ceiling projections of the fermentation room and thus provide a collaborative process.

“We wanted something that would serve winemakers and be hands-free,” he explains.. We had the idea of putting all that information on the surface of the dome. That's when I started studying projection technology. I am a pilot and, during my annual training, I was in a flight simulator and I was wondering how they got that perfect curved and blurred image. I walked up to the front of the simulator and saw six or seven Christie projectors; “I called them and we got to work.”.

The winery originally installed projectors Christie from Serie M. “We needed enormous clarity, luminosity and durability -emphasizes Christian Palmaz-. We used this original range for over a decade and then we update to the M 4K25 RGB equipment for even more shine. “They are incredibly bright”.

Los sensores RFID installed in each fermentation tank can identify which winery is in front of it and display personalized data on the vaulted ceiling of the room, that now thanks to the greater brightness of the new projectors it has more illumination.

“Color is very important,” says Palmaz.. Due to our thermographic screens, color means a lot to us. See its dynamic effect, as when temperatures change when pumping occurs, It's like varying the tones of the water in the bathtub. We are talking about a temperature change of 5-6º in the tank. But the range of colors shown by the projectors helps to visualize the slight variations in temperature”.

This has been one of the advantages “we noticed with the newer projectors; They have a very wide color gamut and greater color accuracy. “This translates into a better understanding of temperature and how it is distributed within the tank.”, concludes Palmaz.

How do you explain Joel St-Denis, director of product management at Christie, “Over the last decade we have invested significantly in the development of pure RGB laser lighting systems, delivering more than twice the color of a typical laser phosphor projector. In a third-party investigation a few years ago we discovered that the 78% of those surveyed indicated 'color fidelity' as one of the most important factors when purchasing a projector".