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