Bottling Complete!

So for the past two days we have been bottling! When we bottle we hire out a truck to come to the vineyard to help us out. This time we bottled the Les Vents de Anges Viognier, the Verdejo, the Rose, the Royal and the Consensus. On Thursday we started with the Verdejo and then moved onto the LVD. We finished up the night with the Royal, which turned out to be quite a pain. Since we use the small belissima bottles, they kept tipping over and I believe we had about 3 casualties. On Friday we did the Rose and the Consensus. So let me take you down the assembly line:

First the empty bottles are put onto the conveyor belt.

Then the bottles are flipped over and cleaned out with a citric solution.

After that they flip back over and are filled to the brim with wonderful Keswick wines.

Then the cork is inserted into the bottle. Then the foil, or capsule, is put onto the bottle. Lucky for us, this machine decided to break on Friday so we had to hand capsule all of the bottles. Once the capsules are on they go through a spinner. The capsules are loose over the neck of the bottles and the spinner magically tightens them.

Last but certainly not least, the labels are put onto the bottles. Then you've got a bottle of wine! The whole process goes rather quickly (if we don't run into any bumps) and at maximum capacity we can pump out 48 bottles a minute!We did a good job and got all of the wine bottled. But it started snowing on Friday night and we had to leave before we added labels to the Heritage. I'm bummed about this because I cannot wait to have the Heritage in the tasting room!