Optimal Control Applied to Oenological Management of Red Wine Fermentative Macerations

• Main Authors: Ricardo Luna, Bruno M. Lima, José Cuevas-Valenzuela, Julio E. Normey-Rico, José R. Pérez-Correa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-06-01
• Series: Fermentation
• Subjects: model predictive control; wine fermentation; dynamic optimization; multi-objective optimization; multi-criteria decision-making; knee point
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2311-5637/7/2/94

The management of wineries for industrial red winemaking is limited by the capacity and availability of fermentation tanks over the harvest season. The winemakers aim to optimize the wine quality, the fermentative maceration length, and the fermentation tank’s productive cycle simultaneously. Maceration in varietal wine production is carried out until a specific sugar content (digging-out point) is attained, finishing before alcoholic fermentation. Winemakers have found that by trial and error handling of the digging-out point, they can improve the winery capacity and production cost. In this work, we develop an optimal control problem for managing the digging-out point considering two objectives associated with process efficiency and costs. A good compromise between these objectives was found by applying multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques and the knee point. Two control strategies were compared: free nutrition and traditional nutrition. TOPSIS and LINMAP algorithms were used to choose the most suitable strategy that coincided with the knee point. The preferred option was nitrogen addition only at the beginning of fermentation (6.6–10.6 g/hL of DAP) and a high fermentation temperature (30 °C), yielding the desired digging-out point with a small error (6–9 g/L).