(Wines&Vines) - Here's What Works: Setting up a system for quality assurance from bottling to distribution

San Rafael, Calif.—You bottled 1,000 cases of 2016 Chardonnay over two days. Near the end of the run, your sterile filter plugs, with about 80 cases left to bottle. You grumble about using another expensive filter cartridge. You have an eight-person bottling crew waiting around, so you rush the filter preparation process and skip bubble testing. Three months later, you learn that you’ve had a few customer complaints of cloudy wine that’s also a little fizzy.

 You’re worried that you have a giant problem and might need to recall the entire vintage from the market and your warehouse. 

A scenario such as this will test your quality-assurance and lot-traceability systems. For many, lot traceability is considered another “have to” of useless government paperwork or is easily dismissed because wine isn’t cheese. It can’t kill you. 

Siemens is Europe’s largest industrial manufacturing company, making everything from skyscraper fire-safety systems to medical diagnostic devices to industrial-automation equipment. Its quality standards are among the highest in the world, and if the company makes things incorrectly, it can kill you. On Siemens’ website, lot traceability is defined as the “readily available access to the complete history of all manufactured lots, batches and serialized units, spanning production in multiple plants. It includes materials consumed, processes and equipment utilized, parametric and quality data collected, exceptions, rework, dates and times, and electronic signatures.” Sounds as if they gave this some thought.