You know that episode of “I Love Lucy” where she is working on the chocolate factory line and they start coming so fast they end up just starting to eat them to keep up? That’s exactly how I felt during my first experience helping bottle wine.
It was SO fun but wow, I had no idea how fast you have to work to keep up with the amount of wine bottles coming at you! I recently had the opportunity to help one of my favorite winemakers, Mark Blatty with Bryon Blatty Wines bottle some of their newest babies!
First of all, I had no idea that you can literally rent a TRUCK with a bottling line in the back that will show up in a parking lot, ready to go and fill up these bad boys. We walked around to all the different stations of the bottling line before getting ready to try a hand at bottling ourselves!
Working side by side with a friend at the packing station putting finished bottles into case boxes, we took turns filling half a box, sliding it to the other person while passing a new box over our heads so she could start with the fresh box while I finished loading and sending the box through the tape line where someone else grabbed it and threw it on a palette.
75 cases of wine and many paper cuts later, we finished in less than an hour!
Number one thing I learned while boxing up wine? Those bottles can definitely handle some rough housing. We packed all the bottles upside down and were dumping those suckers in a box two at a time with not a light hand and they took it like a champ!
Number two take away was how fast the entire process was. The empty bottles were loaded onto a conveyor belt and a pump is hooked up to a barrel and pumped into the machine where each bottle is filled and then immediately corked. If you are labeling your bottles as opposed to already having your label screen printed, the labels are added as well as capsules if you are using, and then sent to the end where humans package the finished wines by hand.
It was such a great experience to see a different side of winemaking and it is definitely hard work even with a machine doing most of it for you! I am always so excited to get my hands dirty and be a small part of the behind the scenes in the wine making process and am so grateful to Mark for giving me my first experience learning how to bottle wine.
I’m looking forward to the day I can try hand bottling to see the difference!
