Bittersweet Bottling

As you might imagine, bottling wine is pretty satisfying. You've crushed and pressed the grapes, seen the juice through its fermentation, coddled it through its maturation period, frequently touched, tasted, and examined it, and maybe stayed up multiple nights worrying about it, and now it's time to release your baby into the world. The only thing standing between you and freedom from care over this particular batch of wine is the bottling process.
In the early days of Babcock, bottling consisted of a series of steps, all done by hand: filling the bottles, corking, capsuling, applying of labels, and loading into cases. These days, all the same steps are involved, but it's all automated. Like the majority of wineries in the world, we enlist the services of a mobile bottling line. A bottling line is perhaps the most expensive piece of winemaking machinery out there, and with all those moving parts, maintenance and repair can be a nightmare--better to have the whole thing roll in on the back of a truck, all ready to get the job done, and operated by experts. We use Bottlemeister from San Luis Obispo, just to the north of us. The downside of outsourcing the job is that you want to have a large enough quantity of wine to bottle to make it worthwhile to bring out the truck, which usually means having them there for 3 or even 4 verrrrry long days straight. This week, we bottled over 5,000 gallons in 3 10- to 12-hour days.

We start bottling days out arriving at work with the sun at 5:30 am. There are some things we have to prep before the truck arrives at about 6:00, and backs up to the warehouse. Even in May in California, it's pretty chilly at that hour,(about 11 degrees) and we had rain to deal with as well. Nice.

After hooking up all the hoses and pumps and prepping and sanitizing everything, the line finally gets rolling about 8am. We have a crew of about 8 vineyard guys who look after the beginning and end of the process--loading the empty bottles on to the line at the start and then casing up the full bottles and loading them onto pallets. Putting the full bottles into the cases is the most backbreaking job, as you have to bend your back over the line and heft the full bottles to keep up with the pace of the conveyor belt.

Two guys who come with the truck oversee the line and keep it stocked with corks, labels and capsules. The only other manual part is putting the capsules on the bottles prior to them being "shrink wrapped" on. This takes two people to keep up with the speed. It's a hard job to keep at for the number of hours required. The bottles go by at about 2 per second, which means you have to stay focused and you can't even look away or take the time to scratch your nose or take a drink of water. Standing in one place for so long is hard on the lower back, too. Even just being on the truck is fairly tiring, since with all the machinery running, and clanking bottles, the noise is nothing short of cacophonous, and you have to yell if you want to talk to anybody.

The empty bottles are loaded on to the conveyor where they're drawn into a vertical wheel where they'll receive a dose of nitrogen prior to filling. The bottles then go on a jolly ride on a series of "merry-go-rounds". The first is where they get filled. Ever wonder how "short fills" (bottles that come off the line not quite full) happen? Usually, it's because of a little flaw in the neck of the bottle--unevenness in the glass or a little indentation. The filler on the line has a sensor that senses a bit of splash when the wine level is getting near the top. If there's a flaw there in the glass, the splash starts a little sooner and the sensor shuts off the filler prematurely. It's the capsulers' job to try and spot those short fills as they come along and take them off the line. If we miss it, off it goes to the case and ultimately, to an annoyed customer.

The next carousel is the corker where the corks get squeezed and then jammed into the bottle with a punch. Generally speaking, synthetic corks go in nice and smoothly and neatly. Real corks, because they're not so perfect, can have some problems--sticking out of the bottle, or pushed in too far. The capsulers have to watch out for this too.  The capsulers then put on the loose-fitting capsules and they go through the next carousel where spinners press them on tight. The labelling is cool. The labels are on a big long roll, and alternate front and back labels. The bottles get herded into a little narrow passage on the conveyor with sides that press against the bottles and cause them to rotate. As they rotate, they roll over top of the labels which come along with the bottles on the rest of their ride to the cases.

The whole process looks like this:

Things can go wrong. Incompatibility problems with bottles, corks, capsules and labels can make the whole process a lot more painful and time-consuming. Trying to make the packaging cost-effective means experimenting with new suppliers of the various components, and that can lead to problems--capsules too long for the bottle, so they won't go on neatly; labels that don't work with sloped bottles, etc. Sometimes, you can have 3 in 10 bottles with unacceptably wrinkled labels. When that happens, we pull them off the line, soak the bottles in water so we can scrape the labels off and then run them through the labeler again, with our fingers crossed. The bottling guys can make adjustments to mitigate these problems, but even so, we often have to have somebody standing watch to pull any bottles off the line that aren't perfect.  A couple of hours as the "watchman" can leave you feeling a bit dizzy and sleepy, especially with the rhythmic thrum of the line. Ron, the Associate Winemaker, remembers one of his first bottlings, as a cellar rat, when he was assigned to keep watch, and actually started to fall asleep, accidentally leaning on the emergency stop button.
With all the moving parts and potential for fingers to get caught--and removed--drowsiness isn' t recommended on the bottling line! Thankfully, everything went relatively smoothly this round, and the bottling is done for another couple of months. Looking forward to some normal-length workdays and toasting our efforts with some newly-bottled wines.

Die-a-toe-What?

We’re prepping for a bottling run here at the winery, and there are a few things we need to do in order to get the wines ready. While our very best wines are lovingly produced in small quantities and without any filtration required, we also make some more everyday wines on a much larger scale, and these we have to filter to ensure their stability once they’re in bottle. One filtering medium often used in winemaking is diatomaceous (die-a-toe-MAY-shus) earth, or DE. Lompoc, where I'm living in California, is a large centre for diatomaceous earth mining.   Also known as kieselguhr, DE is pretty interesting stuff with all sorts of uses. In addition to filtering wine and other food products, it’s also used to filter water in swimming pools and fish tanks. Yum! You’ll find DE in other common household products as well, like cat litter--and dynamite. Is your mouth watering yet? It’s also great for killing cockroaches and bed bugs, and cleans up toxic spills like nobody’s business.  If you’re not already out the door in a mad rush to get some DE-filtered wine for yourself, consider what DE actually is: coffin-shaped fossils of hard-shelled microscopic algae. All the exoskeletons link together to make a complex labyrinth for the wine to pass through with bad stuff getting left behind along the way. It starts out as a very fine powder but has very sharp edges (think ultra finely ground glass) so you have to very careful not to breathe it in in its powder state as it's a major carcinogen.. The sharp edges allow it to cut through the hard shells of bugs, making it an exterminator's best friend.   More Detail (for wine students--and wine geeks!) For DE filtering of wine, we use a plate and frame filter--a series of heavy metal frames interspersed with plates and filter pads that we force the wine through.     Each frame holds a DE "cake" about 2 feet square and and inch and a half thick. How does the cake get into the frame? Well, from our big tank of wine that we're filtering (in this case, 6,000 gallons--that's about 2500 cases) we put about 700 gallons into an open top tank that has a high platform around it so we can access it from the top. We use a big long stainless steel "spoon" to stir the wine from above like a big cake mix. Once we've got the wine rolling, we dump in about 25 pounds of the powdery DE.     We stir and stir, (and my aching back can confirm that that big spoon is heavy!) while pumping it into the filter housing where it clings to the pads and forms layer upon layer of stuff until a cake forms in the frames. Frame before filtering Frame after filtering, with "cake" You have to keep up the stirring because the DE is a lazy beast (well it IS dead, after all) and wants nothing more than to lie on the bottom of the tank. We stir it to keep it in suspension and on its way.   Once we've got our cake in place, in a perfect wine world, the subsequent wine zips right through, leaving all its bad stuff behind, and coming out clear, and we get through 6,000 gallons in one very long day. Hmmm. I haven't actually seen that happen yet. While DE filtering is interesting, it's no day at the beach and not my favourite thing to do at the winery. The setup, before we even start filtering, takes about 2 hours--to get everything in place and sterilize the whole system. We hope (at this point in an optimistic and gung ho kinda way) that once we're going, we'll be able to continue on for at least a couple of hours. Wine turbidity (amount of thick stuff in it), though, plays a huge part, and ultimately, it's always a trial and error kind of situation for each wine. This is why I won't wax poetic about the joys of DE filtering. It can be hell. Set up for 2 hours and then it all breaks down after 45 minutes--too much pressure in the filter housing, not enough powdered DE put in, too much DE, more turbidity than we expected in the wine-- the variables are many. The pump slows to a funereal pace and the output of the wine through the housing is at a trickle. Then we have to break it all apart and set it all up again (which takes another hour and a half, at least!). Soooo frustrating. Whatever happens, we have to be there til it's all done, and that sometimes means 10pm or later.    Once we're done with the set up, between rounds, or at the end of the day, breaking it all apart is a messy business. We scoop out the sodden DE, which is now like soft strawberry ice cream (if it's a red wine) with sand in it. You can still feel the sharpness of the DE, and it can irritate the hands. We load it all into a bin to be dumped in the vineyard. Then we spray everything off, coil up the hoses and drag our weary bones home to our beds for a night of diatomaceous dreams.