A Day on the Bottling Line

Most people see a bottle of wine on a shelf and never think about what actually goes into the process of bottling. Hopefully, we can provide a little insight into a day on the “line”.

We arrive at the winery at 6:00am to prepare the wine for bottling. A full panel of analysis is run to ensure quality and standards are met. At 7:00am, the 8-10 person crew shows up and the bottling process begins. The process begins with bottles being dumped onto a conveyor. Nitrogen gas blows any box dust out, and then fills the bottles. The bottles are then filled with wine and corked seconds later. Foils are hand applied, then spun onto the bottles. Finally, labels are applied and the bottles are packed back into the cases by hand.

From the moment we begin bottling to the last bottle off the line for the day, monitoring and sampling is done to ensure each bottle looks and tastes as good as the last. This seems easy enough, but inevitably, things break, run out, or plain go wrong. Labels have occasionally been known to find themselves crooked, or bottles not filled completely. These are things that are spotted very quickly and corrected. At noon, a well-deserved lunch is taken by the staff.  We stop bottling around 3pm and the crew goes home by 3:30.

There is not a single bottle of wine that passes by us on the bottling line in which we do not think about our customers. We like to wonder where each bottle is going across the nation, or what occasion beckons for its consumption. Hopefully the next time you pick up a bottle of JUSTIN wine, you too can appreciate the hard work that goes into bottling process.