LUKE WILSON – GET TO KNOW YOUR WEA COMMITTEE

I grew up in Port Macquarie, NSW before heading to The University of Newcastle to study Chemical Engineering. I was fortunate enough to secure industry experience at Masterfoods, which gave me a real taste for engineering in the food and beverage industry. I had some great projects linked with some of my studies including food plant design, modelling cooling tunnels for pasta sauces and my research project Reducing the Oxidation of Lipids in Emulsions (extending the shelf life of mayonnaise).

My girlfriend (now wife) and I moved to SA once we had graduated. We’d discussed moving for a couple of years to see how we liked it. Nearly 15 years, and three boys, later and we’re very much settled.

I started with Tarac Technologies almost immediately after moving to SA and looked after the distillation process at the Nuriootpa distillery site for 3 years.

I get to be involved in many areas of the business. These include taking part in innovative R&D projects, continuous improvement activities, installing and commissioning new plant and equipment, designing green field and existing winery redevelopments, assisting the production teams with technical assistance, building systems to automate workflows for business activities and am involved with the technical aspects of our wastewater treatment plants.

Some of the notable projects I have been involved in are:

• Adoption of crossflow filtration through the wineries.
  • This was underway when I started and I had a key role in getting High solids lees crossflow working at the winery. This was even more challenging as this was one of (and as far as we are aware the) first wine lees crossflow filters in the world.
• Air addition and redox measurement of fermentation
  • This has been an exciting project over the last few years with application of air to ferments reducing formation of reductive aromas and reducing additions of DAP (diammonium phosphate) to ferments
• Bottling Hall and Tirage upgrade projects
  • These were significant project designing and installing new packaging lines at the Angaston Winery to enable us to automate the lines. This has then enabled us to install productivity reporting on the lines to track performance and downtime giving us opportunities to improve.
  • The new filler on Line 2 was a great challenge in maintaining performance while meeting a very tight TPO (total packaged Oxygen) specification.
• Automation of Prebottling filtration and wine delivery
  • Our filtration skid and delivery system has enabled us to really control and track delivery of wine to the line while also giving us better control of CIP.
  • The data we automatically generate through this process has been invaluable being able to track filtration requirements, changing batch sizes as well as volumes per filter housing used.

The next is a picture I took of John Ide saying hi to one of the horses that lives in the paddock next to our carpark. There aren’t too many engineering jobs where you can hop out of your car in the morning and be greeted by a thoroughbred.