Partial red wine dealcoholization assisted by commercial PERVAP™ 4060 pervaporation membrane

The removal of ethanol from alcoholic beverages (such as wine or beer) is a current approach to manufacturing non-alcoholic and low-alcoholic products. Traditionally, the removal of ethanol from such alcoholic beverages is performed via distillation or evaporation. In wine, the removal of ethanol remains a challenge, as most of the organic compounds, that provide organoleptic and body properties to the wine, are also lost with the ethanol. As an alternative, pervaporation (PV), which uses selective dense membranes, represents an attractive alternative for the selective extraction of ethanol from the wine matrix. In this work, we implemented a lab-scale PV process using a commercial organophilic PERVAP^TM 4060 membrane for the pervaporation of ethanol from commercial red wine (ethanol content 12.5 vol%) with an operating temperature between 20 and 50°C. The measured flux at 50 °C was 0.765 kg m² h⁻¹, with separation factor of 7.4. Apart from the process efficiency, we studied the membrane resistance and calculated the apparent activation energy of ethanol/water in this process Special attention was given to the impact of the PV process on ethanol removal and the concentration of metals in wine.