Bottling Day

{DT=2009-05-29 @07-59-41}{SN=001}{VO=5555}
Originally uploaded by craighaarmeyer

How do you bottle 1200 cases of wine in under 6 hours? Call up Harry, Frank and Dan of Mobile Wine Line.

With crush '09 fast approaching we decided that even faster bottling was required to finish up for our '07 reds and '08 whites so we called in the Mobile Wine Line. These guys are great. They are the original mobile bottlers. Harry's mother hatched the idea of a bottling line on wheels and his dad engineered and built the first one years ago. Their truck is amazing, so is their efficiency, speed and quality.

They show up at 3 in the morning to prep and by 7 your tanks are hooked up to their pumps and you're bottling one case of 750s every 10 seconds. That includes sterile filtering through their plate and frame filter and their membrane, filling, gassing, corking, foiling, labeling and taping up and labeling the cases.

We bottled 1259 cases, 6 wines in all, starting at about 8:00am and the last cases rolled off the line at 2:15pm. If you consider that there were a few delays totaling at least and hour, that's 5.25 hours..that's 4 cases per minute and it would have been even faster had we larger lots.

KP, Jason and Sam handled the forklifting and stacking, keeping the flow of empty glass going and loading the finished pallets onto the truck. Rich staged the cases of empties and I madly dumped bottles onto the conveyor belt, feeding the machine. Harry and Frank ran the actual business end of filling, corking, foiling labeling and so on while Gina, Alex and Dina took turns placing the finished bottles into cases. Finally, Evelyn placed the cases labels neatly and stacked. Let's not Forget Nancy and uncle Pete. They kept us organized: directing, staging labels and calculating the quantities and volumes.

So, thanks to everyone for making the day an inspiring success!