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June 17, 2019 | Sam Freed

Getting to the Bottom of the Bottle

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From vine to wine, a lot more goes into bottling than you may think!

Below is a breakdown of everything that happens throughout the process from tank to case - with plenty of pictures!

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First things first, we clean everything! Hoses, pumps, the filter, we even disassemble filler heads and clean individual parts again.

"Ensuring clean product and preserving the quality of the wine is our number one priority when moving wine across containers."

- Fabian Olvera
(Assistant Winemaker)

Once all components have been cleaned, a steamer is attached to the bottling line and sterilizes everything that comes in contact with the wine. Next, hoses are attached to holding tanks and the wine is pumped from the tank → through the filter to ensure there is no yeast or bacteria in the bottle → and into the filling tank on the bottling line.

The bottling line is then turned on, and our wine making crew (affectionately dubbed the Cellar Rats) take their positions as the glass is dumped onto the conveyor belt.

The glass enters the filler-station and is sparged with nitrogen. The nitrogen sparges and displaces the oxygen (enemy #1) in the bottle.

sparge:
/spärj/
verb
gas flushing; process of using gas to absorb and carry a contaminant with it as it rises to the surface and is vented away from both the process stream and vessel.

The sparged bottles then move onto pedestals that rotate and the bottle is filled. These pedestals raise the empty bottle upward into the filler heads, opening them and filling the bottle with wine from the filler tank.

The next step is corking the bottle, simple enough, right?

The newly filled bottle is conveyed to the corker but we are still fighting with enemy #1 - oxygen! So as the bottle is being corked, the corker creates a vacuum in the head space while simultaneously pushing/pulling the cork into the bottle, to top it all off - literally!

For quality control, Jr. uses a vacuum pressure gauge every so often to test whether the bottles are being properly sealed to ensure there is sufficient negative pressure in head space in each bottle.

The bottle now moves to the capsule machine where it passes through a laser that triggers the capsule to be blown onto the bottle neck.

The capsule is secured and made snug by rollers to prevent creases. This ensures that is remains in place until you're ready to get into your wine!

It then passes through the labeler, and your Jo Mamma's Mango Tango, with her fresh new look, is cased and ready for you to order that "sweet" wine!

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