To paraphrase the late, great Andy Rooney,

Bottles entering the fill station.

'Did you ever wonder' how the wine gets from barrel to bottle? Well, here's the answer.

Not everything about winemaking is glamorous (in fact, very little about winemaking is glamorous  ). Bottling day is one of those un-glamorous but necessary jobs that we go through. We bottled our 2018 Archimage, 2018 Illusionist, 2018 Funkadelic, and 2018 Spiders From Mars. It always is a team effort. Keith pulls together the bottling crew (usually composed of our friends here in the valley). It is a long day of monotonous work, with each person assigned a specific task for the day.

But before we can get the wines to bottle, there is a lot of prep work ahead of bottling day. Keith and Taylor spend the week prior pulling all the barrels out of barrel storage that are to be racked to tank. All the available tanks are scrubbed clean, and each individual lot is racked to its assigned tank (meaning the wine is pumped from the barrel to tank). Once the wines are safely in tank, we apply a layer of Argon gas (an inert gas heavier than oxygen) to protect the wine since oxygen is the ultimate enemy of wine. These wines will stay in tank until bottling day, usually anywhere from 1-3 days for us. The barrels then have to be rinsed with 180 degree water to sanitize and clean the insides, allowed to dry overnight, and then SO2 gas is dispensed in the barrel to protect it from spoilage, so we can use it again for the next vintage.

We use a mobile bottling truck, that has all the equipment built into the back of the truck. Bottling lines are expensive and take up a great deal of space. It is more economical for us to use a mobile bottling line, rather than incurring the cost of purchasing, storing, and maintaining a bottling line. The disadvantage to this model is that you must schedule your bottling dates WAY ahead of time, and you are on their schedule, not yours.

The truck that we use can bottle up to 300 cases an hour. The flow looks like this. The wine is pumped from our tank to the fill tank on the bottling truck. We drop a pallet of empty glass on the back of the truck, and one of our volunteer’s “dumps” the glass onto the conveyor belt, where it starts its journey. The bottles move through the line in this order. First, the bottle is sparged with nitrogen to blow out any dust that may have accumulated in the cardboard box. It is then filled with wine, and immediately a cork is inserted mechanically. Two of our volunteers then apply the tin capsules over the top of the bottles by hand, and the capsule is then “fitted” snuggly by mechanical rollers. The labels are mechanically applied, and then the bottle makes its way to the packaging area, where two more volunteers insert the bottles back into the empty boxes. The case is then sealed with tape, and outside labels are applied before being stacked and pallet wrapped. The wine is now ready for storage.

If you’d like to volunteer sometime, shoot Keith an email! He’ll get you on our volunteers list.