The Wine Is In The Bottle!

Yesterday was a momentous day for me. After years of planning and waiting, I bottled my first vintage. Woohoo! We bottled 300 cases of the 2006 Eight Arms Syrah, Stagecoach Vineyard, Napa Valley. That’s 3,600 bottles! The mobile bottling unit arrived at the winery at around 7 o'clock in the morning, we started bottling at 8:00 am and were completed by around 1:30. There were nine of us there and the process is pretty simple. Dump the empty bottles out of their boxes, sparge with Nitrogen to get any dust out of the bottles and then place them on the filler. Next the corks are placed into the bottle under a vacuum, the capsules are then attached, the bottles are labeled and then placed back in their boxes ready to be sold. Well, not quite. They will need 4–5 months of bottle aging so that they can recover from bottle shock (what happens to wine when it is bottled – the components tend to fall apart from the harshness of the bottling, but then slowly come back together). Below are some pictures of the bottling.

Empty cases of bottles with the mobile bottling unit in the background

The wine going into the bottles

Labels waiting to go onto the bottles

A finished bottle coming of the line

Cases stacked and ready to go!

The Eight Arms 2006 Syrah Labels Are Printing

Last Thursday I went up to Petaluma to press check my labels. As you can see from the pictures, the proofs looked great. Once I had approved them, the printing began. It’s hard to believe that it only took them 45 minutes to print 4,000 labels! This week they will foil stamp and die-cut the labels and they will be ready by the end of the week. What perfect timing because I am filtering the wine on Friday so that it can be bottled on Monday! If you are wondering what the actual label looks like, then stay tuned, as I’ll post pictures of them later in the week.

3,600 Bottles and 4,000 Corks

It looks like I will be bottling my 2006 Syrah in a couple of weeks and everything is finally coming together. My bottles are here and ready to be filled. Seeing the six palettes of them stacked in the corner of the winery is finally making the whole idea of having wine to sell very real (see photo above). I also received my corks and as you can see from the picture they are very cool looking. The octopus printed on the cork looks fantastic and I think they will be a great addition to the final bottle of wine. A nice little surprise when you pull the cork!




The next step will be printing the labels. I can’t print until I get approval from the Feds, but I’m hoping to hear from them today. If all goes well I will be printing labels on Thursday and then bottling on the 23rd of this month.