Bottling Successfully Accomplished

Bottling is always a traumatic operation – it’s the only real time where we’re completely reliant on someone else (I’m not sure that’s 100% true but it feels like it). Doubly traumatic this time as we’d had to postpone it a couple of days due to a hurricane knocking out our power supply. The recent spell of cold weather also made life difficult – the wines had to be warmed before bottling otherwise it’s too difficult to predict the final level in the bottle. Today was no exception to the cold-snap – the vines were well and truly frosted over as we set about the task.
We’d decided to try to handle the operation ourselves (with the exception of the man who owns the bottling lorry, more later) – so our hit squad for the day is Iain, Jacky, Roy (Iain’s dad) and our good friends Ray and Shelagh. Ahead of us is the challenge of getting all the 2008 Chater Sauvignon and Rosé, along with our 2007 Merlot Cabernet blend, from tanks into a total of almost 13,000 bottles. The bottling is done by a guy who has a mobile bottling line – he’s great, does all the set-up necessary to start bottling and then throws himself into any activity needed as the day progresses. The lorry and trailer arrive at about 7:30 and set-up of the bottling line begins. Iain is frantically working in the winery to prepare the wines and get them to the right temperature before we begin. Then, all of a sudden, it’s all systems go. The team works really well and we quickly fall into separate roles; Shelagh loading empty bottles, Iain and Jacky loading boxes with full bottles, Roy and Ray (or ‘the trolley dollies’ as they came to be called) using the pallet lifter to move full boxes and getting new empty ones for Iain and Jacky.
Hard work but the time passes remarkably quickly and before we know it the white wine and rosé is done – remarkably, without a single problem. We even manage to start bottling the red wine before lunch. Ray reckons we’ll finish by 3.30! The bottling guy thinks it’ll be 4pm… We break for lunch and open a bottle of Chater Sauvignon 2008 – less than 4 hours after the cork was put into the bottle! Happy to report that it lives up to our pre-bottling hopes – possibly the best Chater white wine to date…. People start to snooze so Iain cajoles the team from the warmth of our living room to the arctic climes of the winery. It’s fair to say that our backs are starting to feel a bit fragile. We crack on. If I learnt one thing today it’s how important it is to get the first layer of bottles in the box in exactly the right place. One mistake and the subsequent layers gradually get worse and instead of a nice flat boxful you end up with a higgledy-piggledy mess of bottles. Yuk. Anyway, apart from a few ‘layering’ problems and three broken (empty) bottles the whole exercise completes without a hitch. All done by 4:10. (bottling man 1 – Ray 0). We trudge back to the house and leave the bottling guy to pack up. Pretty much everyone collapses into a chair (Iain’s happens to be in front of the PC to write this post). We congratulate ourselves on a job well done and calculate that our average age is 59.2 years!!!