Bottle It Up!

2010 Fiddlestix Pinot
is going into the bottle!

Of course it will need time to rest in our temperature-controlled warehouse to ensure that, when it is released in 2013, it will have our signature elegance that we promise to deliver to your glass. 

We believe bottling is a most critical step in the transfer of the fruits of our harvest labor and the barrel aging process to the wine in your glass.

Follow our process and check out our videos of the bottling in action…

  1. Throughout the wine's maturation in barrel, we devote time for extensive blind tasting of each barrel to 
      determine our barrel blends - that is, the best fit barrels for "728", "Lollapalooza" and "Doyle".

  2. During its aging process in our French oak barrels, the wine has naturally clarified and the natural
     grape solids have fallen to the bottom of the barrel.

  3. The crystal-clear wine is racked (or decanted) off the sediment (natural grape and yeast solids) to our
      stainless steel tanks to marry together the nuances of each barrel into one master blend.  This ensures
      every bottle is exactly the same.

  4. Now that the wine is prepared with the utmost care to not introduce excess oxygen, the bottling
      process begins. 

 5. The empty wine bottles (referred to as "glass") 
     are carefully "dumped" out of their cases and
     are escorted via a conveyor belt through the line.

 They are "picked up" into a circular wheel, inverted
 and sparged with inert gas (nitrogen) to displace air
 and cardboard dust.

 
  6. The wine is transferred to the filler bowl, and the bottles are then fed into the filler wheel where spouts enter
      each bottle and deliver 750 ml of wine (plus a few extra drips!)

  7. The filled bottles are fed into a vacuum that removes any volume over 750 ml plus the oxygen in the
      headspace, just before a cork is mechanically squeezed and plunged into the neck of the bottle, leaving
      the top of the cork exactly level with the top of the bottle.

  

  8. The corked bottle is mechanically “topped” with our 
      custom-designed tin capsules, tapped and fed into
      the spinner heads which stretch and mold the loose 
      capsule to the neck of the bottle.

9. The corked and capsuled bottles then pass an electric eye that triggers the release of the back and the front
    labels (which are vacuum held onto a belt until the bottle passes by), at which time the adhesive on the labels
    grabs the bottles in a very specific, electronically set placement.

10. The labeled bottles pass to the quality control
      station where two people examine every bottle for
      correct fill height, cork & capsule quality, label
      position and appearance, and glass quality before
      returning the finished, filled bottles back into their 
      original box so that the cork is “neck down” in its
      final resting position.  To ensure we have full
      cases, the first in line packs 6 bottles only and
      passes the box to the second QC station where
      the remaining 6 slots are filled.

 

11. The box is fed into the tape machine and  
       stamped with our winery bond number and the
       bottling date. Another wine label is squarely
       positioned on the outside of the box for
       identification and the boxes are stacked on a 
       pallet in a well-defined configuration with 
       14 cases per row and 56 cases per pallet.

 12. With our equipment we can bottle about 2,000 cases per day of one wine and one bottle size.
      Changing the bottle size requires changing all of the feed wheels on the bottling line and definitely
      slows down the process.

 13. 3-Liter and 5-Liter bottles are filled, corked and labeled by hand….and so are some of our magnums!

It is a lot of hard work to get it right, but our wine is ALWAYS taken care of and our meticulous and energetic crew ALWAYS gets a great lunch! Team work is the name of our game!