Startup company hopes to cash in on waste product from wine making

While many of us spent the holiday season cracking open a bottle of local vintage, a startup company based in Geneva was trying to squeeze profit out of a waste product that comes from making wine.

Employees of Seneca BioEnergy spent the days before Christmas pressing dried grape seeds, culled from local wineries' pomace -- the mess left over after you squeeze grapes to get juice to make wine.

The company was formed in early 2008 to make biodiesel fuel from corn, soybeans and grape seeds, planning to integrate its energy production with other small companies that need a source of energy.

Between the drawing board and the recent installation of grain-pressing machinery in Romulus, Seneca County, however, the company made an interesting discovery: Grapeseed oil is way too valuable as a culinary product to waste in your car.

Grapeseed oil from Europe sells for more than $45 a gallon, though home chefs typically buy it in smaller quantities, prizing the product for its ability to fry at higher temperatures than other oils, and the way it coats more evenly, ensuring a little goes a long way.

A Chautauqua-area growers' cooperative sells a Concord grapeseed oil, charging $15 for a one-cup bottle by mail order.

Michael Coia, an environmental engineer who is the startup's CEO, hopes the local nature of his product will make it attractive, too.

"This is the first Finger Lakes grapeseed oil, harvested from Finger Lakes grapes, processed in the Finger Lakes and sold in the Finger Lakes," Coia said.

The first press was done on small machinery at the Cornell Agriculture & Food Technology Park Farm, a business incubator in Geneva.

The oil will be tested for its best uses next door at the Food Venture Center, operated by the New York Agricultural Experiment Station.

Seneca BioEnergy has its offices at the Tech Farm and rented a lab there to press the oil in a culinary-safe setting.

Seeds were separated from the rest of the pomace and dried, though, at the giant warehouse space that Seneca BioEnergy purchased on the former Seneca Army Depot in Romulus, where it's also about to operate a pilot operation for biodiesel production.

"With the right presses, there are many different markets," said Herb Cooley, a research technician at the Food Venture Center who has worked to develop grapeseed oil products.

Wineries that sell wine-related products in their tasting rooms would be the first customers. Coia said every one of the 21 wineries he approached about the product said they'd be interested in selling it.

Restaurants that make use of local wines, gourmet food stores and even large grocery stores that cater to foodies would be good bets, too.

"You're not going to sell this to the average person who's buying corn oil to do their frying in," Cooley said.

The oil's properties might also make it well-suited to cosmetic uses, he said.

Perhaps the oil's greatest promise, however, is in how it makes use of a waste stream.

"It's a great way to take care of potentially a big, giant waste product," Cooley said.

Depending on the variety of grape, between 20 percent and 45 percent of the grapes by weight ends up as pomace, Cooley said.

Wineries often spread the substance on the grassy areas between their rows of grapes. Often, though, they simply pile it up to rot somewhere because too much pomace in the vineyard can alter the soil composition and plant grapes where the farmer doesn't want them.

"About any place I know would be happy to have you cart that away," Cooley said.

Coia said he got 200 to 300 tons of pomace from three wineries to run his pilot project, which produced 6 tons of dried grape seeds.

The Food Venture Center will test not only the oil from Seneca BioEnergy's Riesling, Niagara and Catawba grape seeds, but the "meal" leftover from the pressed seeds and the dried pomace, too.

"There's got to be something you can do with it, because it is still food." Cooley said.

Cooley said his own experiments revealed that Concord oil smells like the familiar juice that comes from the grape. Riesling and Cabernet Franc grapeseed oils have distinctive scents, too, but not as grapelike.

Once Coia gets the report on the oil from the first press, he'll decide whether to press the seeds in varietal batches or make mixed Finger Lakes grapeseed oil.

"We started our business plan with the idea that varietal-specific bottling will be done," Coia said. He expects the oils to be available for sale at local wineries about the same time as the wine made from the same grapes is -- in the spring.

Meanwhile, Coia and operations manager Walter E. Bennett Jr. are working on their other pilot, making six tons of biodiesel a day, hoping to produce and sell enough to convince investors to back a larger operation that can process 500 tons of soybeans a day. With the banking crisis of the last year, it's been difficult to get a loan for startups, Coia said.

The company already has an agreement to use the fuel in a fleet of natural-food delivery trucks and for heating oil at two companies in Tompkins County. But some of the fuel will generate electricity and steam used right at what Coia is calling the "Seneca Ag Bio Green Energy Complex," -- the 400,000 square feet of former military warehouse space that Seneca BioEnergy owns.

The idea is to create a network of businesses housed there, each relying on the others to provide green energy or other materials.

The first tenant is Top Quality Hay Processors, a company that uses heat to dry locally grown hay to form a uniform, higher-quality feed for horses, rabbits, gerbils and hamsters.

Currently, Seneca buys petroleum-based fuel to make the electricity it uses itself, but Coia said it will generate electricity from biofuels starting this month. When Seneca is fully operational, it will provide steam to Top Quality for drying. The hay company employs 18 full-time workers for six months a year, but could do more work with a steady supply of inexpensive energy.

"We're looking for products we can dry year-round," said Jeff Warren, CEO of Top Quality.

And Coia is seeing useful byproducts everywhere he looks.

For instance, when you press soybeans, Coia said, you produce glycerin as a byproduct. Local makers of soaps and candles get their glycerin from out of state, he said.

"We think we'll be making large quantities of glycerin," he said. And, possibly, yet another profit stream.
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