Fake Plastic Barrels: 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.