With a love for wine and a condo close by in Todos Santos, I have visited the winery many times. I have had the opportunity to meet Harold Osborne and Paul Magot, the winemakers a number of times to learn about their operation. In mid-September, La Tinajas Winery start to press and process that grapes that they have available for the next year’s production of all different types of varietals. This year Harold said that they crushed almost 25 tons of grapes, much of them from vineyards in La Constitution further up Baja California Sur on the Pacific Ocean side. The crush is a very intensive activity and can take both a lot of manpower and a lot of electricity.

It was only recently that I learned that La Tinajas Winery operation (making the wines, separate from the tasting room) is completely powered by a solar system installed by TVLsertec, Los Cabos’ second oldest solar company, founded in 2013. The roof of the winery side of La Tinajas is covered with 75 Canadian Solar panels with 410 W each. This provides a total potential of 30.75 kW of energy and hour to run the operations of La Tinajas in the production of its wine. The energy from the solar panels is converted to electricity to directly operate the winery operations and to charge the lithium-ion batteries with Victron Inverters and three Victron charge controllers. One charge controller is dedicated to each of the three Pylontech battery management cabinets. Each cabinet holds 6 4.8 kW lithium-ion batteries for an overall storage capacity of 86.4 kW of storage.

All of the crush, bottling and capping equipment as well as the fermentation tanks and storage areas in La Tinajas Winery are operated on an ongoing basis with this solar system. Harold mentioned that the crush in September was disrupted when a tropical storm came through for four days limiting the real time availability of solar energy and that this required some of the crush to be done by hand.