What’s the best way to free up barrels you’ll need for crush?
Bottle!
Today we bottled more than 910 cases of a number of Borra wines, yielding 36 barrels for re-filling.
Most Lodi wineries are done bottling by mid-August, but Borra sees an advantage with waiting until the last-minute.
“This way my barrels don’t stay empty for a long period of time, which can mean more chance for contamination,” says Markus Niggli. “Ideally I would bottle today and put new wine in tomorrow.”
Empty barrels are ozone-washed to kill off any living things left inside, gassed with sulfur dioxide, then bunged and stacked, waiting for wine to be pressed into them.
As for the process of getting wine into bottles, with the cost of a small automated bottling line heading easily into six figures, most small wineries work with equipment shoe-horned ingeniously into semi trucks and rented by the day.
We tend to use Mobile Wine Line of Galt, run by trusty head honcho and truck captain, Harry Hakala, along with a couple of life-long friends.
As of 9 a.m. this morning, the truck’s team, aided by a crew of about 7 from the neighboring Lodi Irrigation staff, had boxed up 111 cases of 2007 Old Vine Barbera, and a bunch of 2008 vintage wines, including 118 cases of Merlot, 58 of Members Reserve Intenso, 73 of Members Reserve Syrah. The photos show the team working on 550 cases of Red Fusion.
Empty bottles were constantly loaded into the back of the truck, filled with Nitrogen, then wine, screw-capped, labeled, and finally placed back into the same boxes for cold storage.
The process can be back-breaking, but is always very satisfying, knowing that the winemaking is absolutely finished.
“The cycle has closed,” says Markus.
While the team was hard at work, Markus and Steve Borra were busy with quality control: making sure the right labels were going onto the bottles; helping with wedging finished pallets of cases into a cramped storage room; tasting new bottles; and ensuring that everyone was to get their Dante’s Philly Cheesesteaks done up the way they wanted for lunch.
It will be a busy week, with this bottling, followed by over a hundred La Dolce Vita club shipments tomorrow, and the start of grape sampling for sugars on Thursday.
If all goes well, we could be picking our first Chardonnay of 2010 within two weeks.
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