Here are photos (by Elde Stewart) from our wine bottling experiences.
We bottled our 2010 "Purple Haze" Tempranillo early to get the wine out of the heat of our garage!
Here, you see Kevin and Mace finalizing the setup in our garage/bottling facility.
It worked nearly flawlessly. We only lost one empty bottle to the recycle bin, and it turned out that we wouldn't have had enough wine to fill it anyway. How perfect is that?!
The wine was pumped into a food grade container.
From that container, the wine got pumped into the gravity flow container.
The wine flowed into the bottling machine.
Here, Mace demonstrates how quickly one can become an expert at hand bottling wine!
Mace places the filled bottles on the table to his right, where Ron prepares them for corking.
Here, our friend and neighbor Bob works with Ron on the fancy (not really) corking machine.
Place the cork in the top bin, set the bottle on the platform below, and crank down on the lever. HARD!
It takes some muscle! Which is why corking is not my duty!
Instead, I do stuff like cut labels.
Here, Judy and I pose with label sheets and cutting tools in hand.
The work surface was our dryer.
We meticulously cut each label and placed them in a temporary storage bin (otherwise known as a cardboard box).
When wine bottles were filled, corked and dried with a towel, we would slap a label on them.
No! We placed them carefully on the bottles!
Then back to cutting!
Our friend from French class, Barbara, stopped by to check out the scene, but we didn't get a photo of her.
Instead, here is a classic pose.
Elde makes me look good for the camera while I prepare to fill these glasses with some of the great wine flowing through our garage!
After we cleaned all the equipment, we headed over to Salinas River Valley winery at the home of Kevin and Maryella.
Check out the next post about our fun with that process!
1 comment:
Bottling the wine is really the most exciting part of winemaking process. It means that the long wait is over, and the wine is now finally wrapped into a sellable product. Anyway, I wish that you are sparging the wine bottles first with nitrogen so that it will remove the remaining oxygen in the bottle. You know, too much exposure to oxygen can make the wine become brownish and would taste a little flat.
Rob Feckler
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