Wine Wednesday: Bottling
Or Wine Thursday…so we’re about a week and a day late with this post but it’s just been CRAZY behind the scenes this week.
Last week a big trailer pulled into the Vineyard at Grandview…and with it a state of the art bottling line!
This bottling line has 16 filler heads and can bottle 3000 bottles of wine per hour at top speed!
Thanks to Mark and Elizabeth Lacy from Virginia Wine Bottling, LLC and 2 days of hard work, we now have our newly made Sapphire White and Pop Umble’s Black Cherry in bottles!
The first step was set-up and cleaning out the line to ensure no contamination. Then we started emptying cases of empty bottles onto the line. In their first stop on the line, the bottles are cleaned. Then comes the wine!
The wine is pumped from our tank into the line and each bottle is filled with the right amount of wine! This is our Sapphire White!
Next comes the capsules…
And the labels…this was the tricky part and our rate limiting step this time. These labels didn’t want to come off of the roll flat so there was a lot of starting and stopping! And the adhesive was too sticky on the black cherry labels! But we learned a lot about what to check for and quality control in the label department!
Finally, the bottles were packed up, slid down the belt, and the cases labeled with the wine and the bottling date.