Bottling at DeLille Cellars
While attending the DeLille Cellars 30th Anniversary celebration, I was lucky enough to meet a few of their winemakers and talk about their wines and operations. I expressed my interest in getting involved and learning the ropes, so they were gracious enough to invite me to assist with their bottling operations over the past few weeks. For starters, I have to give a huge shoutout to the amazing women who are running the show behind the scenes in the warehouse. Sarah, Mari, Page, and Sophie were absolutely killing it every day I was there to volunteer. Not only were they incredible at multi-tasking the 1000 things going on at once in a winery warehouse, but they were also gracious enough to answer all my silly questions and teach anyone/everyone who was willing to learn. I was also privileged to work alongside several volunteers who, like me, come out to help just for fun and some have been doing it for 20+ years!
For those who are not familiar with wine bottling (myself included until recently), most wineries do not maintain their own bottling equipment and instead, hire “mobile bottlers”. The cost of maintaining the space and equipment for machines that are only used for a few weeks a year doesn’t make much sense, so these mobile bottling companies are instrumental, servicing 100s of wineries in the region throughout the summer. I worked with Signature mobile bottlers, and their set-up is top notch! The entire assembly line is constructed inside of a semi-truck trailer, and all they do is back it into the loading dock of the warehouse, run a hose from the tanks to the truck, and away you go! (Ok, there’s a little more to it than that I guess…)
Step 1: The wine is pumped into the truck from the holding tanks inside the warehouse. Everything is meticulously cleaned before, during, after, and then cleaned some more whenever a new wine is bottled, and at the start/end of every day.
Step 2: Pallets of empty wine bottles are stacked at the end of the truck where workers (like me) empty them out onto a conveyor belt here the process starts. For context, I put 15000 bottles through the machine on my first day and couldn’t feel my shoulders for a few days after.
Step 3: The bottles file into the machines and get a quick spray of nitrogen into the bottle which displaces the oxygen and allows for a perfect vessel for the wine. **Oxygen is not good for stored wine, but is great once opened to let it breathe**
Step 4: Once cleaned, the bottles are filled with the specific wine label chosen. I was lucky to bottle both DeLille’s famous D2 and Signature Syrah.
Step 5: Once filled, the bottles are corked, with a batch of new and labeled corks fed in from a large hopper above the machine.
Step 6: After corking, 2 lovely and patient workers quickly and carefully place the foil caps over the top, where they are then compressed onto the bottle, sealing the cork and bottle neck.
Step 7: The bottles rotate around a labeler machine, which applies the front and rear labels to the bottle.
Step 8: The finished bottles continue down the conveyor belt, back to the front of the truck where the process started, where they are placed back into boxes, run through a taping machine, and then re-palletized for shipping.
From start to finish, we were fully bottling a case (12 750ml bottles) every minute, with continual bottles being dropped off and full ones hauled away. The entire operation took about 12-14 people, and everyone worked with such care and efficiency that in all the time I spent there, not one bottle was broken or any wine spilt (un-intentionally). Thank you again to the awesome folks at DeLille for allowing me to catch a glimpse and be a part of the magic that is wine production.
