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