Off The Line | Vineyard & Winery
Off The Line Vineyard is an up and coming independent producer, owners Kristina Studzinski and Ann-Marie Tynen brought their first vintage to market at the UK wine awards to be awarded a silver medal for their Hip Rose; not a bad start!
Located at Hellingley, Off the Line is a small vineyard with mostly south facing slopes in one of the sunniest areas of England, the East Sussex Weald.
Kristina and Ann-Marie have completed the building of their new winery to enable them to fulfill their dream of producing fine quality wines at Off the Line Vineyard. During the design phase of the new winery, Kristina, whose former career was a government lawyer was quick to recognise that winery waste was classed as industrial waste by the Environment Agency, and as such would require an Environmental Permit to allow biological treatment of the waste and discharge of the final effluent on site. Being 2 km away from the water company mains network and no guarantee (even if the waste could be routed to this point) that the small village works could take slugs of very strong effluent during harvest; and having determined that in the long term on site storage of the waste for removal by tanker was going to be costly, along with not being Environmentally friendly when one considers the carbon footprint left by a tanker operating, the method of choice for dealing with the waste was full biological treatment. The Bio-Bubble sequenced batch reactor process is well placed to deal with strong difficult wastes; as a consequence we were approached by Kristina to produce a strategy with detailed design to deal with the waste once we had gained an Environmental Permit to discharge to the water course running across the site.
It took 3 or 4 months to be granted an Environmental Permit to discharge the treated water to the water course and we were fortunate enough to have had winery waste treatment experience with 3 other sites not too far away, these provided analysis results and supporting information to demonstrate the Bio-Bubble process was a viable sustainable way to deal with the issue locally.
Bio-Bubble will remotely monitor the process with information fed back via a broadband link from the probes fitted into the reactor. This way we can make any seasonal adjustments that are needed.
