The Annual Golf Tournament

It's August and at my winery that means two things: Harvest preparation and Golf.  

Every year in August the entire company goes golfing.  All the employees are split into teams of 4 and we all play 9 holes at the local golf course in Yountville.  We used a lot of golf carts.

Due to lack of additional golf carts, these guys brought their own.

It's a really great opportunity for the production crew to mingle with the office staff and the marketing and sales folks and guest relations and the maintenance guys and the vineyard workers and the IT guys and the seasonal interns.  People that don't typically interact on a daily basis get to work together on a team to win prizes.

Here I am with the lovely Kelsey having a beer before our 1:30pm tee time.  She works in guest relations and we usually only interact during lunch.

Bets on whether he works in the vineyard or in an office?

I also love how the game brings out the style.  Reggie has style for days.

My intern also has some stylish (if not entirely traditional) golf attire.

After lunch we practice and warm up for the tournament. 

Lunch - check.  Warm up - check.  Beer - ? 

Before we get in our golf carts and compete, we must make sure we have plenty of beer for the ride.

Beer - check.

The beer is because the last time that 97% of us played golf, was at last year's tournament.  We are not a golfing crew, which makes the game much more enjoyable.  And why 9 holes takes us almost 4 hours.

True story, they hired a masseuse to give us a little rub down half way thorough the game.  Being terrible at golf is really tiring.  I could have used her after every shot.

Vineyards and golf courses take up some seriously gorgeous real estate.

The winning team wins gift certificates and the losing team wins golf lessons.  I have won golf lessons before, which I guess worked because I did not win them again this year.  

Soon we will stop going on field trips and playing golf and start making wine again.

-L

Day Trip: CHEESE! Not just any cheese but GOAT CHEESE!

 I don't know if I've made it clear.  But I love my job.  I love it for a lot of reasons, but on this day I love my job because it takes me to places like this:

The Laura Chenel Chevre Facility in Sonoma.

Bottling is done, the grapes are slowly ripening in the vineyard, so it was a perfect opportunity to take a field trip to Sonoma.

 

This is Todd, I like to stand next to him because he is so tall.  When we arrived we were asked to put on smocks before entering the brand new pristine facility.  

 And then they asked us to wear booties, and then hairnets and then for a lucky few, beard-nets.  This was a special trip because their facility is very concerned about hygiene and does not usually allow visitors.

The problem with not allowing visitors is that it also means not allowing pictures.  They are very private about their set up and equipment and it was very difficult for me to steal a few pictures.  Their facility looks a lot like a winery, large stainless steel tanks, pumps, hoses and pipes all over the place, except that instead of wine, everything is full of milk.

There were a hundred very cool things I wanted to take pictures of, but could not.  However, at the end of the tour they handed out some books and I took pictures of the pictures in the book to help illustrate how awesome cheese making is.

Firstly, these are goats.  They make awesome cheese.  I learned that they produce milk all year long, but not very much in the winter.  This is different from our grapes that are only produced once a year in the fall.  This makes goats more awesome than grapes.

Farmers collect the milk and deliver it to the Sonoma facility every other day (but only twice a week in the winter).  The milk arrives in a large truck (like when we receive bulk juice or wine) and is pumped into a stainless steel holding tank inside the facility.  

The very same day that it arrives at the facility the milk is pasteurized and put into another tank where a bacterial culture and rennet are added.  It then sits over night.  The following day it is time to drain and gather the cheese.  This shows the milk being poured into white bags that squeeze the liquid (whey) from the curds.

Depending on how much moisture they want to retain, they can vary how much pressure is applied to the bags.  You can barely see the yellowish whey collecting at the bottom.  This can take between 4 to 6 hours.

At this point I snuck a picture of our guide reaching in to let us taste the cheese.  He hopped up and scooped out a fist full of warm 24 hour old goat cheese and let us taste it.

The cheese tastes different at this point, largely due to the higher moisture content and warm temperature but still wonderfully delicious.

This is taken from the book.  Here they are separating the curds and whey by hand with draining fabric instead of the large automated bags.

I feel like this guy should have gloves on.  I mean, if we had to wear full body gear and all just to enter the facility.


And once the curds are separated, all that is left is to mold the cheese into a specific shape and package it.  Here they are adding spices to the little logs before they package them.  That's it.  It takes two days from raw milk in a truck to a log of cheese at a store.  TWO DAYS! So fresh!  Compared to the three years from grape to wine bottle for us.

After the tour we had the opportunity to taste their finished products.  This is a Chabis, "a traditional 'pillow' shape; plain, herb, dill or black pepper".

And then we had more cheese.  They call this the Blossom, "a fresh goat cheese surrounding a heart of sweet and savory flavor"

 This is the Tome, "a firm ivory colored, hand formed wheel - aged 6 months".

But my favorite was the Melodie, "a soft aged goat cheese covered with ash"

 This is all of the products.

This was in the book, and so beautiful I wanted to include it.  Food photography is it's own art.

Some people I know would like to be winemakers, but all the winemakers I know would like to be cheese mongers.  Because seriously cheese is awesome.  And being an monger is way better than being a maker.

And on a semi related note, this is a 16 inch wheel of goat cheese decorated with flower petals that I had at a wedding recently.  It took a full 35 minutes before anyone would dig into it because we all thought it was so lovely.

If anyone is getting married soon, please have giant cheese wheels at your wedding.  And please, please just have cake.  Wedding pie is not cool.

-L

More Bottling Footage! Also, a giant lemon.

First, check out this giant lemon I found!  The size of an orange.  Organic Napa fruit is out of control.

Which reminds me of another large fruit photo-op.

Anyway,

Even though Bottling is over, I still have it on the brain.  I spliced together some footage that I collected over several months.

The first video shows a mobile bottling line bottling white wine (say that three times fast!).  Not all wineries have their own bottling line.  Mobile bottling lines come to you in a large 18 wheeler.  Since bottling only happens once or twice a year, many places rent a mobile bottling line for that time period.  The advantage of a mobile bottling line is that your crew doesn't need to maintain  it in the off season.  Additionally, if your winery is low on square footage, it saves space to not have a whole room of equipment to store.

Several factors like case production, space and man power determine whether it is cheaper to bottle with a mobile bottling line or for the winery to buy the equipment and do it themselves.  Since most white wine is meant to be consumed quickly, the bottles in the video are immediately labeled and sent to be sold rather than stored.  Therefore the winery doesn't have to worry about the degradation of the packaging during a long aging process.

Since my current winery produces red wine, it is only bottled at the winery and labeled several months later, closer to release date.

The next video is not from a place I worked, but only briefly visited.  I found the giant scale of production interesting and captured some footage.

Having worked at a small winery that hires a mobile bottling line, a medium size winery that maintains a bottling line at the facilities to use once a year and a large production winery with a line that bottles all year round, I can say that I prefer the mobile bottling line.

The major disadvantage of having a mobile bottling line is that you don't always have as much control over your product as if it were on your own bottling line.  However, I think that it's outweighed by the convenience of having an expert come to you, bottle the wine, and then leave.

This will be it for bottling until next year.

-L

The Fifth Week Part 2

So where were we? Oh yeah, start the day with a 6:30am, 20 glass wine check.  Give the OK to start.

Empty glass is dumped onto belt.  It is screened at the light box, then pulled into the orbiter to be sparged with nitrogen to remove oxygen and debris.

 The bottles are filled, leveled off and corked.

This is where I come back in.

Another part of QC is making sure we are not picking up too much oxygen in the bottling process.  Too much oxygen will accelerate the aging process and decrease the age ability of the wine.  Some wines are made to be consumed in 6 to 12 months of production and other are made to be consumed 3 to 30 years after production.  This wine is the latter.  This picture shows a Dissolved Oxygen Meter taking a reading of an empty bottle that was sparged with Nitrogen.  Regular air saturation is around 9mg/L.  This bottle is at 0.59mg/L.  Pretty good.


We know that the Dissolved Oxygen measure in the wine at the Tank is 0.04mg/L.  We minimize oxygen pick up by removing as much of the oxygen from the empty bottle we are putting wine in, and then we check to see how much DO is in the bottled wine.  Here it is 0.14mg/L, only 0.10mg/L pick up. Very good.


Another important check is the pressure in the head space.  We pull several bottles right after they pass through the corker and pierce the cork with a pressure gauge.  The corker is supposed to pull a vacuum before it inserts the cork.  The pressure gauge shows the headspace is at -4psi.  This is very good.  If it showed a positive pressure it is very likely wine would be pushed out and we would have many leaky bottles.

 After the QC checks, each bottle continues off to be packaged.  It takes a bottle 5 minutes from the dumping station to the end of the line where it is put in a box.

 The bottles are put into the cases upside down.  The timing is such that the two people filling the cases do not have time to close the cases.  So they go down the conveyor belt open.

Another person is needed to close the cardboard boxes and flip them so they are right side up.  You want to store bottles long term on their side or upside down to keep the cork moist because otherwise you risk it drying out and shrinking and leaking wine.  Conversely, if you turn the bottles upside-down immediately after they have been corked, they could also leak.  A cork is compressed from 24mm to 16mm in seconds, it returns to 90% of it's original diameter in seconds but it takes another 12 to 24 hours to go the last 10%.

The person who closes and flips the boxes does not have enough time to stack them on a pallet, so another person is needed only to stack.  There are 56 cases to a pallet.  This is the hardest job.  And by hardest I mean sweatiest.

The person stacking cannot drive the forklift to remove the pallet so another person is needed to drive the forklift to lift the finished pallet out of the way and lift it onto the wrapper.  The machine wraps each pallet in plastic wrap and gets it ready to be shipped off site.  After 24 hours a specialized forklift flanks the pallet on 3 sides and flips the whole thing over so that all the boxes are now stored cork down.

Final tally:

1 - forklift driver to load empty glass

1 - glass dumper

1 - glass QC 

1 - fill height and pressure QC

2 - case fillers 

1 - case flipper and closer 

1 - pallet loader.  

Additionally there is a ring leader to make sure the line is functioning correctly and overseeing everyone on the line.  Then I do QC on the line and take bottles up to the lab for capacity checks.  It takes a minimum of 10 people to run the operation but we run better with 12 to 13 people.

We spent 5 weeks bottling the 2009 Vintage.  It will be bottle aged for over a year in a warehouse offsite before it is released to the public.  We picked the grapes in the Fall of 2009, fermented and blended until the end of the year.  In January 2010 we begin barrel aging for 18 months.  We bottled in July 2011 and then we put it away for 15 months and release it October 2012.

Quite a labor of love.

-L

The Fifth Week Part 1

This is the fifth and last week of bottling for the year.  I'm too tired to be excited.  This is a piece of the bottling line.  The bottling line has several components and takes many people to run.

First we need 1 person to forklift new pallets of empty glass onto the platform.  The second person is a Dumper.  They take the empty glass cases behind them and dump them onto the conveyor belt infront of them.  He places the empty boxes to his right and they roll down the metal scissor ramp.

A third person is needed to QC the glass.  After the empty glass is dumped on the conveyor belt is passes infront of a bright white light that highlights any imperfections in the glass.

This lights shows any inconsistent coloring, air bubbles, scuffs, chips, scratches or seams from when the bottle was made.  This step is important for high quality and esthetics but also safety.

If there is a chip or an air bubble in the wrong place, it can weaken the glass.  In this case there was an air bubble in the neck and when the cork was pushed through it broke the glass and sliced the cork.  I've also seen bottles crack and explode if there are bubbles on a seam and the bottle gets knocked in that area.

If the bottles pass our quality standard then they go immediately into the McBrady.  This carousel takes 22 bottles and as they pass around it they get hit with a jet of Nitrogen.  The Nitrogen sparges the air out of the bottle (to reduce oxygen pick up during the bottling process) and also serves to remove dust or cardboard particles.

This is the control panel where we can control the speed of every conveyor and piece on the bottling line.

After the bottles have been sparged with nitrogen they go to the filler head.  This filler has 20 nozzles to fill 20 bottles at once.  To insure consistency from the tank to the bottle, before we begin bottling we taste a tanks sample and . . .

A sample from all 20 filler heads.  Every day.  For five weeks.  At 6:30am.

 Once we have give the go-ahead  the bottles move from the filler head to the leveler.  The filler head is suppose to dispense 750ml, but sometimes it doesn't.  The Leveler is to make sure that each bottle gets as close to 750ml as possible.  If it was filled a little too much by the filler, the leveler sucks out a tiny amount.  The wine travels from the thin white tube at the top of the leveler to a keg and the wine is discarded.

 

After the leveler it passes to The Corker.  This corker has 4 jaws that compress a 49mm cork to 16mm to be fit the cork into the neck.  At the same time that it does this is also pulls a vacuum in the headspace beween the top of the wine and the bottom of the cork (called ullage).

 

A fourth person needs to sit where the newly corked bottles come out to QC.  At this point we check the fill height, depending on the temperature of the wine we want the top of the wine to be between 62mm and 65mm from the top of the neck.  We also check that the corker is pulling an adequate vacuum (between 0 and -3psi).  Negative pressure is important because as the wine warms to room temperature (we like to bottle at 15C) it will expand and if we didn't have a negative pressure in the ullage, this simple and slight expansion would cause the cork to push out and leak wine.

After this QC point the line snakes back and forth for a while before it gets put back into cardboard cases. The line processes 68 bottles per minute and it take 5 minutes for a bottle to get from the beginning to the end of the bottling line.

 After 5 minutes is makes it's way to the packing station.

At this point 2 people are needed to keep up with the speed of the line.  Two people fill cases.

Up Next:

Part 2 - I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

-L