How do we put our wine in bottles…thousands of them, each year? We use a semi-automated bottling line that with five people can fill and label 25 bottles per minute. The machine rinses each bottle with filtered water and then fills it with food-grade Nitrogen. The bottle is then filled with exactly 750 ml of wine and a screw cap is applied. Then, the bottle is transferred via a conveyor to the labelling machine which applies the label after which the bottle is returned to its carton.
And, why do we use screw-caps instead of corks? Back when we started Tassel Ridge Winery, nearly 10% of all wine was damaged by bad corks. Screw caps allowed us to make better quality wine and avoid the problems that bad corks were causing.
How often do we bottle our wine…is it all at once for the year or is it spread out over the year? The bottling season starts in late October, usually with our Nouveau and we finish up bottling just before harvest, usually in late July. That means that we bottle about nine months per year. We generally bottle on Wednesdays and a normal run is 600–700 12-bottle cases. Before each bottling run, we spend at least an hour running steam through all of the machine’s plumbing to assure that it is completely clean and we repeat that process at the end of each bottling session. Cleanliness is essential in packaging good wine.
