24 | Active Refrigeration Blenheim T T Rosa Watson Protecting Marlborough’s precious harvests “Once the grapes come off the vine, time and temperature take over, and from that point fermentation cannot be paused or repeated. Get the cooling wrong and there is no second attempt until next season.” REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT For Marlborough’s wineries, refrigeration is not just a utility – it is the difference between a great vintage and a lost one. And the Active Refrigeration Blenheim team are there to protect the one window that matters. “A winery gets one chance a year,” branch manager John Phibbs says. “Once the grapes come off the vine, time and temperature take over, and from that point fermentation cannot be paused or repeated. “Get the cooling wrong and there is no second attempt until next season. A failure at the wrong moment can cost a tank, a batch, or in the worst case, an entire vintage.” That’s the problem Active Refrigeration Blenheim exists to solve. “Wine quality revolves around controlling ferments, and that is done by cooling the tanks,” John says. “We run some pretty large-scale plants in the wineries to keep ferments under control, so the wine quality is at its best. That is the majority of our work.” For a winemaker, refrigeration is not just another piece of plant. It is the safeguard standing between a season’s work and a costly loss. “So the question that matters most is not how clever the system is, but whether it will perform exactly when it is needed,” says John. Active Refrigeration has built a reputation as a genuinely safe pair of hands. The Blenheim branch opened in 2010, when John saw that the growing local wine industry needed installation, service and maintenance close at hand. Today, a team of 10 in Blenheim and seven in Nelson covers the Marlborough region, backed by the scale and resources of the nationwide Active Refrigeration Group – local people that know each plant, with national depth behind them. The current focus is keeping ageing plants reliable, John says. “Every plant is getting older and needs more maintenance. We are very much into preventative, proactive maintenance. “Rather than waiting for a breakdown mid-harvest, the team runs planned programmes, compressor overhauls and shutdown servicing, and keeps critical spares on-site so a fault never becomes a crisis. “A well-trained service team that knows a plant deeply can spot a problem developing long before it threatens production. For an owner, that is the difference between sleeping soundly through harvest and lying awake.” The company’s track record is substantial, and in its largest-ever local project the team installed just under seven megawatts of cooling at Constellation Brands. The team has also delivered and now services systems for Delegat, Indevin, Cloudy Bay and Whitehaven, among others. Group buying power keeps pricing sharp, and the in-house Active Academy trains technicians in the way the business works, across every discipline a regional team needs to cover. The plants have provided a real opportunity hiding in plain sight, John says. Most wineries run their refrigeration plant flat out through harvest, while separately burning diesel or gas to produce the hot water used for cleaning and processing. The two systems share nothing, and the heat the refrigeration plant rejects to the atmosphere is simply wasted, he says. “A lot of tank warming is done with diesel boilers or gas califonts. “But if you can recover energy off your refrigeration plant, you are basically getting heating for free, because otherwise that heat is just rejected to atmosphere.” Captured and upgraded through a heat pump to the 65 degrees a winery needs, that recovered heat can deliver five to six times more hot water per unit of electricity than resistance heating, cutting energy bills and emissions together. “With export markets watching sustainability credentials ever more closely, it is a capital decision that pays back through lower operating cost.” John says the message to winery owners and to operations and engineering managers is straightforward. “Whether the need is service, a plant upgrade, more capacity or lower energy costs, Active Refrigeration Blenheim is built to protect the one window that matters. “The best time to talk to the team is before the next harvest, not during it.” We engineer quality refrigeration solutions to meet with the exact needs of our customers. Providing quality solutions and parts, that are energy efficient and reliable. ENGINEERED REFRIGERATION SOLUTIONS Unit 5-6, No. 589 Tremaine Avenue | 06 355 4066 | sales@coolingequipment.co.nz | www.coolingequipment.co.nz
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