Bottling Wine. Wine Bottling.

The first day of work at Frankland Estate and the rest of the week were bottling days. I could tell by the moans and groans that this was not the favorite part of the wine making process and not a great way to start. But, that’s ok, it can only get better from here, right? When I think about bottling wine, I usually think about when we went to see the bottling of Francia Corte and also when we were in Tuscany and saw the old man manually putting the DOC labels on one by one. The first day we were bottling their Rocky Gully Shiraz Viognier 2010.

My new office.

Here’s how it works:
There is a huge pallet piled high with four layers of empty bottles. Felix stood at the beginning of the conveyer belt and had to place the empty bottles onto the line. He was in charge of ripping the plastic off each load, removing the plastic layering between the rows of bottles, and then making sure there was another pallet ready when he was done loading.
The bottles would go down the conveyer belt into the glass-enclosed part of the machine, which cleaned, filled, capped, and air-dried each bottle. If the bottles are not being label at the time, they come out the other side and two of us would have to take the bottles – four at a time – off the conveyer belt and lay them in strategic alternating layers into a metal or wooden crate until it was full of bottles and had to be fork-lifted away and another crate brought in. This was my first job. It was ok with two people, almost a bit slow as each had their own side of the crate to lay the bottles as they came out, grabbing four at a time, but if one person left to check on the machine or anything, it was double time. The machine wouldn’t wait for you and the bottles would start to line up. It was a lot of layering, bending over the sides of the crate to place the bottles at floor level, grasping four bottles at the time causing fingers to cramp and blister to form so that you would have to figure out different positions to wrap your fingers around them and not drop them. I even broke a bottle – oops. I think it was weak glass. Mmhmm. No, seriously.

If the bottles were to be labeled, they would continue on down the conveyer belt, line up and pass an electronic sensor so the labels would come out, wrap around the bottle to secure the stickiness, and end up on a revolving round disc where I (in my second job for some 2010 Cranmore Chardonnay and Bee’s Knees the following days) would grab the bottles, place them within the cardboard partition in the pre-folded case boxes and push them through the tape dispenser machine to be loaded onto a pallet. This job doesn’t have the consistent bending over or painfully grabbing the full bottles four at a time, but it is still monotonous and repetitive and constant.

 My view.

  I had the bottling thing down, and had some iPodU lectures to keep me from boredom and insanity, but still, any second delay causes one bottle to go by and you’re that much more behind. Whether the table needs to be readjusted from the continual pushing boxes through the tape dispenser, or you find a bottle that is missing a cap or a wrinkled label, or the box is missing a partition, or the worst is when the partition is kinda bent and makes putting the bottles into the slot more difficult by rubbing cardboard-paper cuts along your arms and wrists.

 At one point during the week, Jody picked up a case and they all fell to the floor….the bottom tape dispenser had run out. OOPS. How was I supposed to know? But in the end, not too many of them broke, and we were told could take a couple home: score!

It’s definitely hard work, intensive manual labor, continually doing the same movements for hours at a time, standing all the while, not necessarily making the most ergonomically comfortable movements, lifting full 750mL bottles of wine, and every so often hoping for a little glitch in the system whether it is the supply of caps running slow or getting jammed, the bottles coming out uncapped, or just the welcome of a coffee or lunch break. If that’s the worst of it, then I survived it after four long days. But just barely.