I Had A Lot Of Wine Today

I love Napa this time of year.  Midday can be unbearably hot but the mornings are always cool.  This was taken at 6am, I like how thick and low the band of fog is hanging.  

During bottling the early crew arrives at 4:30am to sanitize and prepare the bottling line.  I get to sleep in a little extra and arrive at 5:30am.  At 6:30am we are tasting 20 glasses of Cabernet to confirm the consistency of all 20 nozzles in the filling head.  This happens every morning for 5 weeks.

 Every morning I start the day tasting 20 glasses but I don't usually go out to lunch.  This day we went to lunch and had 3 glasses of wine.  No spitting this time.

Bottling keeps us very busy and we tend to focus on it exclusively for several weeks of the year.  This day however we had a tasting scheduled for after lunch.  So right after finishing lunch we headed back to the winery to taste another 8 wines.

These were the wines in the blind tasting that afternoon.  All from 1999.  It's unlikely you'll come across a 1999 of any of these wines, but if you do, Mondavi and Showket showed well.

So anyway,

I had a lot of wine today.

-L

Bottling: A Big First Day

To prepare for the upcoming month of bottling I took a break from Napa to spend forth of July weekend in San Francisco.

It was especially refreshing to escape the Napa heat and walk along the Embarcadero.  San Francisco tends to be 15 to 20 degrees cooler than Napa during the summer.

6:00am on a Tuesday morning:

This 8 head filler is how we bottle the large formats (3L, 6L and 9L).  All this work is done by hand.  Currently it has 750ml bottles filled with PAA (Paracetic acid) used to sanitize the line.  It was previously cleaned with sodium percarbonate (an oxidizer) and then rinsed with citric acid to neutralize the basic sodium percarbonate.  After a 5 minutes of PAA continuously cycling through the filler, we rinse with water and the filler is ready.

 Pablo is holding the bottles upside down where the receive a 30 second rinse with water and then a few minutes of nitrogen to displace the oxygen in the bottles.  This is to reduce oxygen pick up during the bottling process.

We use this Dissolved Oxygen meter to measure the D.O. of the wine in the tank and the wine once it is in the bottle, the goal is to have minimal to no oxygen pick up.  Currently the probe is dangling inside the bottle to measure the D.O. of the bottle before we start filling it and to make sure Pablo is sufficiently sparging the bottles.

These behemoths are 9L bottles, for contrast the tiny ones in the middle are actually full sized 750ml bottles.

If the filler fills the bottles too full, and the wine heats up the built up pressure would push the cork out.  To prevent that from happening, we have to make sure the fill levels are not too high.  After each bottle is filled, an intern measures the fill level with a ruler and pipets out excess wine. 

 When the level is perfect, another intern bring the bottle to be hand corked.  One person places the bottle, the other check the vacuum pressure and a third pulls on the level to insert the cork.

 Additional security agains a cork pushing is to pull a vacuum (have negative pressure) in the ullage.  The ullage is the few millimeters of head space between the wine and the bottom of the cork.

Every single large format bottle is treated this way.  They also get packaged by hand; foiled and labeled, wrapped in tissue and put into wooden boxes.  But they age for several years before they are available so to prevent the packaging from getting old, they do not get foiled or labeled until closer to the release date.

Up Next: Magnums!
And I do wish I was referring to the ice cream.

-L