Hanna Wine Titrator

Anybody have any experience with the all-in-one unit, the HI-901W-01? For about $4000 you get pH, TA, VA, RS, YAN, SO2 capability. I had a Hanna SO2 titrator that has crapped out and is too obsolete to be serviced and am considering this one, but I’d like to hear if anyone else has been down this road already. Part of the motivation is that my winery is on Treasure Island, and getting stuff to any of the Napa or Sonoma labs is a hassle.

I have been considering buying a spectrophotometer and saw these as well and was wondering how they compare as far as accuracy, maintenance and ease of use. I haven’t yet come accross someone working with one of these. Looks like the current price on their website is even lower at $3,000.

I have several of the older model, and I’ve found them to be too much work to calibrate, and in any event not as consistently accurate to make it worthwhile.

That being said, my winery is walking distance from ETS Labs, in Healdsburg, so it’s pretty convenient.

I talked with a guy who works with lab equipment pretty extensively, and his take was that Hanna is kind of a money pit. Parts, especially electrodes, fail frequently. That is consistent with my experience with an older Hanna SO2 titrator, but I was hoping that things had changed in the 10 years since I bought that. His strong preference was for Mettler-Toledo equipment, but it’s significantly more expensive.
The basic Hanna model is $3000, but to get the full battery of wine-relevant testing capacity adds another $1000.
When you really, really need a reliable result, ETS is great. But that reliability is pretty expensive. It would be great to do barrel by barrel testing in-house for things like dryness, MLF completion, VA, etc. ETS would bankrupt me pretty quickly if I sent them that kind of volume.

Vinmetrica (below) has several products that cover a good portion of what Stewart wants, and costs a fraction (closer to $1000 all in). I’ve used their Free-SO2 system, and it has worked quite well. Well worth looking into imo.

https://vinmetrica.com/wine-analysis-products/

Hi Eric. Thanks for suggesting Vinmetrica. I was putting a little money aside for Hanna.

Has anyone used their PH/TA/SO2 Vinmetrica SC-300 meter?

I use a Vinmetrica for SO2, it works pretty well and is a painless procedure. I think a +/- 3ppm is probably reasonable to expect and good enough for most of us. I use it with a stand for the probe, burette, and magnetic stirrer I already had, I also use a Vinmetrica replacement pH probe with my pH meter of another brand. I bought it to have a cheap backup on hand thinking that at its price point it would be just that, a backup. When I used it, I found it very consistent and quick to calibrate. Its on year 2 and going strong. I have tried the Vinmetrica add-on for ML testing and I didn’t love it. I think it may have been updated since then so maybe its better now. But I would recommend without hesitation, the pH/TA/SO2 setup.

I used a vinmetrica for pH/TA/YAN for this harvest and it has been easy to calibrate and use, especially once you get your flow down (you do the TA with a 10mL sample as part of the YAN measurement and go right into YAN with the same sample). I had used it for pH and SO2 at the end of last year and while I wasn’t too sure of the SO2 measurements, they were close to what I got from Cornell when we sent samples in later.

How many lots do you have? I’m not a fan of Hanna, and agree with the above that they’re a pita to keep calibrated and will nickel & dime you. They also just look like toys. You’re better off doing A/O for FS and manual TA’s. The all in one Hanna FS/pH/TA/YAN unit I believe is based off the ripper method from the one time I saw that unit demo’d. You also need to swap out the setups from SO2 to acids - which to me is an annoyance I don’t want to deal with.

I’m also in the market for a non-Hanna all-in-one unit but most pressingly need a solution for SO2. When the peristaltic pump in the older Hanna HI-84100 Sulphur Dioxide Mini Titrator in our facility died, I purchased the “new and improved” HI-84500-02 version which uses a linear pump. Nothing but regrets since. The new unit uses two different titrants instead of the single titrant used by the last unit. The titrants have ranges for 0-40ppm and 30-200 ppm. These points were surely chosen by a bean counter to maximize reagent use. So now we have to pull two 50ml wine samples to ensure we can achieve the right range, and switching between the ranges requires a triple flush of the syringe and tubing system, reprime, and recalibratation. Slow, expensive, and maddening. When I cornered the Hanna technical rep at Unified he said there was “significant feedback from wineries about the titrant crossover point” and proposed we buy the all-in-one unit. I should have learned my lesson with the pH meters i have used from Hanna which fail more than once a harvest. I’d love to try a vinmetrica.

Patty used to use one. When I took over the day to day winemaking stuff several years ago I boxed it up and never looked at it again. I use one of the certified labs. I’m not trying to pretend I’m a chemist or some CSI sort of person. I would spend all day doing lab work during harvest if we used one. I get that the expense of sending samples off can be a lot but so can the cost of doing your own work and getting numbers wrong because things were not calibrated correctly, the machine was not working right, you simply made a mistake because you were pulled away from a sample to fix something, look at something, unload a truck, etc. and forgot where you were at. I don’t think it’s a requirement of the job to be a lab tech. Curious as to why people go down this road if the route is not purely a financial decision.

The error percentage of the vinmetrica is higher than sending samples out to labs. But, my experience is the error percent of the vinmetrica is relatively constant. Otoh, the error percent when doing your own aeration oxidation is highly variable. Errors that are relatively constant are, imo, tolerable since you can get used to what’s acceptable with experience.

And sometimes there is an advantage to being able to get a number right away…sometimes.

I end up doing a mix of the two, depending on what makes sense.