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.
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