McLaren Vale Wines – Lonely Grape Series Part 2

Last time I wrote for you I discussed the preliminaries and blending of the first Lonely Grape wines – check it out here.

This time I will be discussing the bottling process. I had heard about bottling but I had not previously seen what happens. I will not bore you with the details of finding the correct bottling line but in this case it was crucial the bottling line could handle small runs – in my case I was looking to bottle 600 L of Shiraz and 300 L of Cabernet. Even thought it seemed like a lot of wine for me, in the world of wine bottling these volumes are minuscule. One of the issues I had was that when bottling there are wine losses – you nearly had to pick me up off the floor when I was told to expect at least 50 L of wine from each bottling. With such small bottling runs this type of loss was unacceptable. Anyway after finding the preferred bottling line (who were confident of less than 5 litres of wine losses) and organising the wine delivery the day finally arrived. I will admit I was more than a little excited and nervous over how it would all go.

When I got there I saw machinery that was fascinating – well for me anyway.

First step (after placing the bottles on the line) was the bottles got cleaned. I was expecting water cleaning but in this case it was compressed air. I was told the idea for the use of compressed air was so there were no issues with water mixing with the wine and thus any resulting dilution.