Dan's Harvest Updates

Bottling Woes

Mon 02 August 2010

Bottling a wine is a bit like marrying it.  It is a moment of lifelong commitment, last-minute nerves and a big day with lots of guests and plenty to go wrong.  As I write I am sitting in the warehouse, the bottling line is silent, the staff are standing around and all because the labels don't want to go on straight for some reason.   

It is a surprisingly fiddly business getting a liquid into a bottle, capping it, sticking on a label and packing the bottles into boxes.  It might sound straightforward, but believe me, nothing could be further from the truth.  I have put together a few of the things that cause daily dramas.

Too much wine. (I know that sounds like a nice problem to have!). What do you do when the bottles or labels run out and there is still 50 litres left in the tank?  Heaven forbid that you should put it down the drain, but at the end of a long day, finding a home for three buckets of wine is a problem I could do without.

Slippery bottles. If the wine is cooler than the ambient temperature on bottling day, then condensation builds up on the bottle and the labels slip and go on all wonky. I don't mind much, but the sales and marketing department get stroppy!

You know those fancy reverse-tapered bottles for posh wines?  Well, I'll tell you a secret.  The reason the wines are so expensive is because roughly half the bottles get broken on the line!  Being thicker at the top, when they crowd together on the conveyors they topple over.  Pretty soon the bottling hall looks like a scene out of a Tarantino movie, with claret all over the place.

The wrong colour, size or shape of the label, bottle, cap, box or divider.  Or not enough of any of them.

Really, the list is endless.

Whilst working on this piece I had a chat to the guys who actually own and run the mobile bottling line that we use, and boy, do they have some tales to tell!  Confidentiality prohibits  giving any names, but there were some horror stories.  Wines so revolting they refused to bottle them, other wines so full of sediment that the thousand dollar in-line filters blocked in seconds, turning up and no wines being ready, turning up and there being no-one there at all! (the winery had forgotten about the bottling and everyone was at the country races.)

At the end of the day, there is no way round it.  If the wines aren't bottled, they are rather difficult to sell.  I suppose we'll simply have to get on with it.  Wish me luck, it looks like it's going to be a long day.














See Also: Ask Dan