GOfermentor was created by Meera and Vijay Singh. We started winemaking for ourselves and found the existing technology surprisingly tedious and environmentally unsound.
Traditional winemaking is more janitorial work than wine making! You have to clean and sanitize all tanks, equipment and floors before you start, then wash the whole mess again when you are done. The amount of wash water used in a winery is mind-boggling: typically six times the volume of the wine produced, and all that waste water must then be treated before discharge.
With red wine, pushing the cap down every few hours is hard and dangerous work. Pressing out the wine at the end is another horrific operation that takes hours, involves CO2 inhalation hazard during tank entry and a host of press malfunction issues. Wine is spilled and wasted everywhere.
Finally, when you get the wine into the traditional wooden aging barrels, you must keep them topped off every other month, necessitating breakdown into kegs and carboys that crowd floorspace and are prone to spoilage and breakage.
These inefficiencies led us to rethink the whole winemaking process. The GoFermentor and SmartBarrel have optimized fermentation and storage so that it’s now easily run by just the two of us and dependably produces wines of high consistent quality.