I’ve always wondered how a winery goes about doing this - getting all the wine from barrels into bottles. Is the process different if you are bottling 4 barrels as apposed to 100? Are all the barrels blended before bottling? How?
The question you asked is really more a novel than a forum posting, I think that’s why no one has replied. Bottling, and everything that goes into it, is the most complex and difficult thing we do.
Try going through this for an idea:
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We have a stainless steel piping system that we installed when we built the winery. It runs from the vinification area to the cellar and finally up to the bottling room. Each barrel is tasted and tested before it is pumped up to a holding tank in the bottling room. After all of the wine is deposited in the tank, the wine goes from the tank to the filter to the bottling machine. Blending is done at the time of bottling. All of it is done under a watchful eye of my husband and our enologist. Wines that are not barrel aged are pumped directly from the vinification area to the bottling room.
That’s how we do it, can’t speak for anyone else.
Most small wineries use a mobile bottling line- an 18 wheeler with a bottling line inside it. They can do around 1500 cases a day depending on how many bottle and label and cork or screw cap changes you make. They are quite efficent and very cost effective.
Bruce, there are some variations, but generally it goes like this.
Prior to bottling, the barrels are tasted and samples lab tested to make sure that nothing is going in to the final blend that you don’t want. Some level of SO2 is added to ensure that the wines are microbiologically stable after bottling. At the same time, the winemaker will make decisions on what (if any) fining and filtering he will do.
A winery needs to get the wine to a bottling line or a bottling line needs to get to the wine. Bottling lines are expensive and require some specially trained staff to maintain and operate. Unless a winery is using a line often, it makes more sense to have a mobile line come to you. (Although we have in the past also taken our wine a permanent line that was available for our use.) Regardless of the location, wine from all the barrels is blended into a tank prior to bottling.
Assuming a well trained crew, no mechanical difficulties, and no unusual packaging requests, it’s a very fast process. Our 375’s and mags are usually bottled by hand as there are usually less than 20 cases each. Last week, we bottled about 135 cases of 750s on a mobile line in an hour.
After the wine is bottled, wineries are then responsible for paying the federal and state excise taxes on the wine. (I believe the requirement is within 6 months?) Once taxes are paid, it can be sold. The decision on when to release is based on a winery’s desire to have the product over the “bottle shock” phase, show well, but need to generate income.
I posted a video on my blog of our bottling last week as well as there are photos of past bottlings.
We’re at the small scale end, bottling 3 bbls a day so far.
Our process is to have all the lab work done in advance, to add necessary sulfites and then pump from barrel to bottle filling station, where one person places the bottles on the 4 spouts, and passes to the other who runs the hand corker.
Two out of shape 50 yr olds can do 900 bottles in a short day without working too hard, and breaking for lunch.
its a workout, as the corker has to take the full case back, stack it, and bring an empty case to the filler.
We’ll label and foil in a separate operation as we will be renting those tools and want to maximize utility of a drive to Rutherford from Gilroy.
S