"Gyropalette" in Spanish?

" Gyropalette (Fr.) Girasol (Sp.): Machine used to reproduce the effect of riddling bottles of champagne or sparkling wine. The gyropalette achieves this within days, compared to several weeks for manual riddling."

You may view a picture of the gyropalette/Girasol at:

How poetic: a sunflower! I'm surprised that the French name is so utilitarian in contrast.

Mark Lipton

Perhaps the French name was a translation from German :-). A French poet from the 1800s likely would have come up with a much more colorful, and perhaps suggestive, name. I recall in college when I first saw the word "strassenbahnhaltestelle" which means street car stop in English. This word built up from a few smaller words is quite descriptive. However this method of building large words in German does not always work as expected. I once did not know the German workd for roast beef. Since I knew kalbsbratten was used for veal roast, I guessed that kuhbratten would be right for beef roast. This sounded very funny to a German student I said it to, and before all was over, the head of the German department, a German-born and educated math professor, and many German students asked me if I had had any good kuhbratten recently.

Certainly not, since they copied (and mechanized) the spanish riddling basket models.

"Street car stop place", to be exact.

"Roastbeef" is very well understood - and used - in German.

Kalbsbraten.

Note that "Rinderbraten" (northern Germany) or "Rindsbraten" (Southern Germany and Austria) is not the same as "Roastbeef". The latter comes from the grill and is always cooked medium, while Rindsbraten comes out of the oven and is normally very well done.

M.

Thank you. These models, however, are not was I was looking for, they are already mechanized, while their predecessors were moved

M.

A site at

"Once the cuvee has been finalised Triage takes place: the wine is bottled along with a measure of yeast and cane sugar, and sealed with a crown cap. Inside the crown cap is a small plastic cup, with its open end facing into the bottle. This is what will contain the sediment once the wine is ready for disgorgement. The wine then goes into stare in steel cages which are racked one above the other by fork-lift truck, with the bottles in a horizontal position.

When the time comes for Removido (Remuage - tipping the sediment down into the cap) the cages ape removed and attached to a Girasol. It was the Cava industry which invented the Girasol ('sunflower') method of removido, in which a whole pallet of wine can be turned through a sector of a circle each day by two men. The old method was to have 'removideros' turning the bottles individually by hand in pupitres, and this is still done in some ofthe smaller houses. The big shippers, however, have introduced a new version ofthe Girasol which takes up rather less room than its predecessor. It looks like a rocking- chair base on to which the cage full of bottles is locked The whole thing is then rocked from one side to the other once each day until the sediment has completed its descent.

Deguelle disgorgement) is fully automatic, with pallet-layers of bottles going neck-down into freezer-baths filled with salt water at about -100C. After 10 minutes or so the necks are frozen, and a computer-controlled system removes cap and sediment, extracts a little wine, mixes it with the licor de expedicion and then tops the bottle up, corks, cages, capsules, washes, labels and packs it in cardboard boxes for shipment."

In case you read Dutch, another site of interest is:

A short description in English is at:

Since both girasol and cava are very common Spanish words, searching Spanish sites is rather difficult, as most references turned up concern cellars, restaurants, sunflowers, etc. Google turns up an extremely long list of mostly unrelated subjects..

Well, in fact I was looking for a picture of the older girasol type (I know how the process works), but a picture search with "girasol cava" didn't bring anything valuable at google.

Thank you anyhow for your help!

M.