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