Oculyze Fermentation Wine

You can choose between Methylene Violet and Blue for your viability measurements. We send methylene violet with every purchase. Methylene Violet can offer advantages; it performs better in growing phases of yeast cells (i.e. exponential and stationary) as well as for cultures with low viability and totally dead cultures.

This feature improves image quality and helps guide you to find the sharpest possible image. As you begin your measurements and turn the microscope knob, you will see the sharpness indicator changing values, once you have found the highest value possible – you’ve found your sharpest image and you’re ready to capture!

Oculyze FW includes the option to manually count your yeast. This function adds a counting grid to your yeast images to mimic a hemocytometer/Thoma Chamber. This also affords you the opportunity to see what other microbes are in your must!

The Oculyze analysis will report on the varying sizes of your yeast. In addition, the algorithm will also identifying the percentage of cells that are budding which can be an indication of good yeast health as well as the stage of fermentation. Finally, Oculyze analyses can identify clustered cells, a task most automated cell counters struggle with.

To learn more about stuck fermentations download article or if you understand the problem already visit our webshop!

To prevent stalled or stuck fermentations and avoid risking the contents of an entire tank or vintage it is fundamental to control the fermentation on a daily basis. Commonly this is done by refractometers and density meters. The challenge with these methods is that density follows the metabolic activity of yeast and if you wait for your sugar content to deviate from your expectations your fermentation is already sluggish if not stuck. By means of a microscope, counting chamber and staining agent you can keep an eye on your yeast population, allowing you to react early to fermentation problems- if you are experienced enough to spot them. Determining concentration and viability requires a lot of practice There is quite a bit of subjectivity involved when it comes to counting cells and determining viability. Which is why the analysis should be conducted by the same person every time. One of the main reasons wine makers stop doing this time consuming analysis is that the manual measurements vary so much that the results cannot be trusted from one measurement to the next- let alone from one year to another. This problem can be solved by automated cell counters for yeast but besides being expensive they are not desinged with wine makers in mind. Do to its very rich microbiologial diversity wine fermentations are particularly interesting and challenging.

Figure: Example comparison of stuck and normal fermentation and problem detection time frame by method

Figure 1 shows 2 yeast concentration curves (orange and dotted orange) and two density curves (blue and dotted blue). While the dotted lines show how a normal fermentation without problems would have developed, the colored lines show a stuck fermentation. Starting from day 3 onwards problems with the yeast become visible via the Oculyze FW-C (magenta bar), around day 7 these problems can be detected via traditional density meters (grey bar). Using Oculyze FW-C the problem will be detected up to 6 days earlier than by only analyzing the density. The FW-C prediction models use a combination of yeast parameters including viability (not shown in the graph above), as well as the density readings.

Another challenge in tracking fermentations the old fashioned way is that even if you have an accurate cell count it takes many years of experience to interpret the value and correlate it with temperature, pH and density.

Oculyze’s FWC cloud based Artificial Intelligence (AI) models bundle years of research and must related data to give the wine maker a tool that not only provides raw data about yeast but puts it in context of the fermentation – just like a consultant would.

FWC enables wine makers to quickly interpret the results of their cell counts by means of warnings if something seems to be off. They no longer need 20 years of experience to know what the cell concentration means for them, they now have a tool in their hand to prevent stuck fermentations.
You can’t control the weather but with FWC you can control your fermentations. You can order the FWC-addon to your Fermentation Wine cell counter here.