About me:

I am an analytical/clinical chemist by training, and have spent 30 years developing and manufacturing diagnostic testing products.  I switched from laboratory-based testing to point of care testing for humans, and most recently adapted the human diagnostic testing techniques to wine analysis.  I am the founder and chief of product development for Accuvin, LLC.

My current interests are wine and food analysis, winemaking, and simplifying the science of winemaking.

Thanks for checking out my blog.  I hope to offer much food for thought. 

 
Accuvin History:

 The idea for Accuvin came with the first harvest from my vineyard.  I had about a half a ton of premium Paso Robles west side Cabernet sauvignon, and I needed to do something with it.  I talked with one of the local commercial winemakers, and he offered to help me make my first wine. In return I offered to do his lab testing for him.  When shown his “laboratory” – really, a small counter in the corner of his office – I was surprised.  The collection of cylinders, burettes, beakers, and a pH meter he had were not what I expected.  In the medical testing area where I had been working, laboratory work involved either fairly expensive equipment for detail work, or simplified test devices for bedside and other point-of-care analyses.  The beaker and burette had been pushed to the side ten to twenty years earlier.

As I worked on the needed testing for the crush, I became curious and contacted other wineries to see if they had moved to more modern techniques.  Well, they hadn’t.  Simple test devices were just not available for wine analysis.  So, I thought maybe I could simplify my life by applying some of the technologies of medical testing to wine testing.

 The first step was interference removal.  Nobody wants to be bothered with some pretreatment step requiring careful measurement and timing.  In medical testing the main culprit was red-colored hemoglobin; in wine testing it was red-colored anthocyanins.  I found a way to do this in a test strip format with a technique similar to that found in the products diabetics use to self-monitor their blood sugar levels.

Following this I adapted some chemical methods to the test strip technology.  The result was a family of tests that included pH, residual sugar for monitoring the end of primary fermentation, and L-Lactic acid and Malic acid for monitoring the start and completion of malolactic fermentation.

Some analyses were not readily transferable to the test strip format.  For these a tube format was best.  For example, I formulated a mixture of color indicators and premeasured titrant to develop a one step test for titratable acidity.

Using these tests I was now able to monitor grapes for optimum time to harvest, and follow key parameters of the winemaking process, in each case getting answers in less than five minutes without cumbersome titrations with a burette and without having to purchase a spectrophotometer or send samples for expensive commercial analysis.