Wine Wednesday: Bottling

Welcome and cheers, friends, to another Wine Wednesday! Our favorite day of the week here at the girl & the fig. Today, we wanted to talk a little but about a step in the wine making process that many wineries are doing this time of the year which is, bottling.

Once wine is clear, stable, and ready to be bottled, many wineries will employ a bottling line, which is a production line that fills bottles with a product on a large scale. Many wineries will contract a bottling company to bring this equipment to their facility, as the entire mechanism can be as large as a semi-trailer truck.

Individual bottles are removed from their original packaging, where they are placed on the line, the first step can include rinsing the bottles and even injecting with carbon dioxide to reduce oxygen. The bottle then will enter the filler, which will fill the bottle with the desired amount of wine, depending on the vessel size. The bottles then enter the corker (or capper, depending on what closure the winemaker has chosen), where the cork is compressed and pushed into the neck of the bottle. The corker will vacuum air out of the bottle, so that no oxygen is left in the space between the cork and the wine. An optional foil capsule may be applied after this. Finally, the bottle enters the labeller, where the labels are affixed to the bottle at the preferred positioning.

Take a look at this video of the girl & the fig’s 2019 Rosé going through the bottling process!