From the Berry to the Bottle
Blog 1/9/10
Like any process people take pride in, the making of wine is a very intricate and time consuming process. The journey from the berry to the bottle can be long and challenging for some grapes and rather short and easy for others, which is one of the many reasons winemaking is such an exciting challenge. In this blog I want to focus on the final aspect of wine production, bottling. Bottling is a very technical and amazing process that most people, unless they have spent some time at a winery, brewery etc., haven’t experienced. Bottling is the final stage for a wine before it reaches the dinner table and let me tell you, it is quite a fascinating stage.
For the past few days I have had the opportunity to work on the bottling line at Castoro Cellars and it is truly amazing how much wine can be bottled in a single day. On a good day of bottling at Castoro 2,200 cases of wine are produced. That is 26,400 bottles a day and roughly 75 bottles a minute when the line is running optimally. Watching this process unfold and being a part of it is really a crazy experience.
At the beginning of the day, around 6am., the bottling line is sterilized and prepped for the day’s bottling while the glass is organized and made accessible for bottling. Once the line has been sterilized the next step is setting up the labeler, which is actually one of the most technical aspects of bottling. The labels are kept on spools inside of a machine that dispenses them appropriately onto the bottles when the bottles trigger a laser sensor located on the machine. Every different wine bottled has a different label and often uses different glass, which makes the labeling process very complicated. For every wine there are specific placement specifications for the labels and getting them to be exactly where they are supposed to be can be tricky when the bottles are flying by at 75 to 80 bottles a minute.
Once the wine has been connected to the bottling line and all the materials are ready to go the bottling day begins. At Castoro, the bottling lines are completely contained within mobile trailers much like the ones you see on the freeway towed behind semi trucks. At the back of the trailer there is a loading dock where pallets stacked with boxes of empty wine bottles are loaded onto the trailer. Once the empty glass has been loaded the empty bottles are put onto a conveyer belt that sends the bottles through the line on their journey to becoming a finished product. On the journey through the line the bottles are gassed with nitrogen (to remove oxygen), filled with wine, corked, capsuled, labeled and finally put back into boxes and loaded onto a fresh pallet to be stored in one of our warehouses to await distribution. The process is in essence a giant circle in which the empty glass is taken from the warehouse loaded into the bottling line, sent through the line to be put back into the warehouse as a finished product. It is truly a fascinating process to experience and we are very fortunate to have an excellent bottling crew at Castoro who bottle fine wine day in and day out.
For more information on bottling at Castoro Cellars visit www.castorobottling.com
Happy 2010,
Luke
