13 July 2007

Making wine is only one aspect of wine as a business. Harvest is probably the most enjoyable time of the wine making process. It begins as summer winds down, the kids go back to school, and I begin trekking through vineyards with my trusty refractometer to check Brix (sugar) levels of ripening grapes.Oh, yes, I also have many clean, white buckets, several towels, and lots of water and a sharp pruning clipper. It’s hot, sticky, dusty work that’s best done early. A lot of grape eating is involved, some spitting and examining of seeds, and careful skin chewing and sniffing. And then they’re finally ripe, picked and coming into the winery, to be crushed and pressed and fermented. Within weeks, the winery is full of fermenting juice and the wonderful aromas of wine being born.

A wine maker’s most unpleasant part of the wine making process is certainly bottling. It’s the last time I get to directly influence how a wine will “turn out”. Will we do some last minute fining to balance tannins or protect against oxidation? Will I filter and how? These are the final wine making questions. What really makes bottling such a headache is calculating and ordering all the packaging supplies months in advance so that they’ll all be in house and counted before the actual bottling date: labels that need government approval each year, even if only the vintage date and alcohol change; corks and foils that are shipped from Spain and Portugal; and the most expensive supply of all, the glass. Did you know that it’s as illegal to overfill a bottle as underfill one?

But the truly hardest task of bottling is overseeing the bottling line. Imagine working along all day at a pace set by a machine. In reality everyone, all the people and the various mechanical marvels that make up a bottling line, must keep up with just the slowest machine – the “bottleneck”. On the line we use, the slowest one is the filler. When it runs at capacity, which is about 100 bottles per minute, it doesn’t seem slow at all. The goal, of course, is to allow it to keep filling bottles as fast as it can and then successfully get the corks in so the wine is protected from whatever goes wrong downstream with the foiling machine, notorious for its ability to wrinkle rather than smooth the capsules, or the labeler or the case printer. To understand what it’s like when things go awry, think of Lucy and Ethel working on the candy assembly line or the Keystone cops rushing to a bank robbery. On the bottling line the people involved are usually the wine maker, always responsible for quality control, and the hapless bottling line mechanic and cellar master. First of all, we’re always screaming because the machines are noisy, the bottles are clanking along, and there’s always a forklift running and a radio blaring an AM Latino station. A problem means we have to scream louder, point at the offending machine, and then run at it, brandishing tools and other objects, often razor blades (to cut off wrinkled foils). The first person at the scene flings open the Plexiglas safety doors meant to protect our hair and extremities from the swiftly moving gears and thingamajigs that are “the foiler”. The second person to arrive pushes the panic button to stop the machine, while the third person just behind turns it back on in order to diagnose the problem. Then the other two are free to dive at the full, corked bottles that back up between the corker and “the foiler”, at risk of falling off onto the floor. They grab them off the line and set them on the cement floor. This is happening at a speed of 100 bottles per minute and it is not pretty; especially if “the foiler” cannot be put right in a matter of seconds.

The other extreme situation on the bottling line occurs when everything runs perfectly. It becomes easy to understand the concept of falling asleep while standing up, watching the endless line of bottles clank by, with smoothly rolled foils, perfectly aligned labels - something must be wrong! Or rather, why did I spend all those years in college to watch these stupid bottles, stand on aching feet, and listen to this bad music? Fortunately, the radio owner made burritos for everyone before arriving at work at 6 am to sterilize the filler bowl. And since it’s the last day of bottling, we’ll have a beer or two for lunch.

Come and watch us bottle! We begin on August 5 with Passalacqua 2006 Barrel Fermented Chardonnay and the 2006 Davenport & Company Russian River Pinot Noir. Make an appointment by calling me at 707-849-3743. Bring earplugs and a wrench.