In between the massive winery operations and the hobby mom-and-pop bottle-by-hand operations is Tony and his truck: a mobile bottling operation that rolls up to your winery to fill, cork, foil, and label thousands of bottles an hour.
I spent today in inside the Wino Semi (officially the “Signature Mobile Bottlers” truck) working with a crew from Robert Karl Cellars locally to bottle hundreds of cases of Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Rose, Merlot, and Syrah. From 7 am until 1:30 pm I loaded empty bottles onto the snake of a conveyor belt that runs up to the front of the semi trailer and back out. Along the way each bottle spins through a gauntlet and ends up shot full of nitrogen, pumped full of wine, corked, capped, spun, and labeled. Picture a semi full of shining metal equipment, and then add in the hiss of pneumatic pumps, the roar of machinery, and the almost deafening clatter of a hundred or so bottles banging against each other as they are funneled into a single bottle chute at the beginning.
I suspect I won’t be able to lift my arms above my waist tomorrow. I may have lost some hearing in my right ear (the one closest to the bottle chute). My hands are covered with paper cuts from manhandling cardboard bottle cases as fast I could for six and a half hours straight.
That said, I had a blast and I’d do it again tomorrow. Well, maybe not tomorrow. I’ve got a date tomorrow with Icy-Hot.
But today was a wonderful day.
Joe and Rebecca Gunselman produce great wine and after drinking a number of their bottles over the years it was a treat to help out. I wasn’t the only one. They pull together a crew twice a year to bottle wine. Fall is a massive operation focused on their Claret. The spring bottling puts up smaller amounts of the other wines offered by Robert Karl.
My station for the day, just inside the back of the truck was both the beginning and the end of the line. Empty bottles head in and the full bottles come back out to be packed into the cases so recently vacated by empty siblings. I got to work today with Karl (Joe and Rebecca’s teenage son), Mia, Gordon, and Ken. Karl, Mia, and myself kept the bottles headed into the mobile bottling beast while Gordon and Ken packed every single one of those bottles back up and sent the cases out of the semi and down another chute into a second truck to be carted off to storage.
Part of the fun of the day was simply understanding. Now I have a picture in my head of one critical step in the work of a winery. Hundreds of steps took place before bottling to make the wine worth the effort of the day, but that only made the process of getting the juice into glass that much more worthwhile.
If you haven’t yet tried a Robert Karl bottle, do so soon.
[caption id="attachment_394" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="Part of the Karl Crew: Mia, Gordon and Ken"]
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