The winery of Mediterra lies in a building ground of 15.000m2 in the village Kounavi of the Nikos Kazantzakis municipality in the prefecture of Heraklion in Crete.
The winery's facilities consist of the area where the wine grapes are collected and processed for vinification, the underground storage and wine ageing area, the two wine cellars with the oak barrels and barriques, the bottling facility and the area for the preservation of the final products.
The storage capacity reaches 19.000hl in stainless steel and oak tanks, while the two wine cellars dispose of over 500 oak barrels (300lt) and barriques (225lt).
The vinification area includes transportation lines and mechanical crushers for the collection of the wine grapes, a heat exchanger for the must, three pneumatic presses, stainless steel and oak tanks and an automatic system controlling the temperature and the development of the alcoholic fermentation.
In the wine storage tanks which lie in the underground, air conditioned area, there is a central system filling the empty space with inert gas.
The bottling line that was recently modernized is completely automated and its production ability exceeds the 4.500 bottles per hour. In detail, the bottling line consists of the empty bottles depalletizer, the complex system that includes the rinsing, bottling and corking (or Stelvin capping) machines, the optical unit controlling the filling and the closure of the bottles, the unit for the positioning of capsules, the labeling machine (for self-adhesive and glue labels) as well as the complex system for the formation, filling and sealing of the cartons.
The final product is kept in an isolated air conditioned area of a total storage capacity of over 450.000 bottles (750 ml each).
The winery's Quality Control Department is full-equipped with instruments for chemical analysis which provide the operation of multiple controls at every stage of the production procedure, from the collection of the grapes to the bottling of the wines. In particular, the equipment of the laboratory includes automatic titrators for the assessment of sulphur dioxide and acidity, a device for the simultaneous assessment of the alcohol degree, the relative density and the total extract in wine samples without distillation, an automatic refractometer, a spectrophotometer, an oxygen meter etc.
