Rocky's Red is in the Bottle

Last week we got a crew together and bottled our 2012 Rocky's Red. We bottled 380 gallons which  turns into 1,908 bottles or 159 cases. Here is how our "bottling line" worked:  Erich uncased the empty bottles and sparged them one by one with Nitrogen. Dwayne loaded them on the bottler and filled them. Jerry took them from Dwayne gave a shot of CO2 for protection and Amy put them in the corker and added the cork.  I was the end of the line and put the now filled/corked bottles into cases, moving the cases to pallets, and making sure our open tanks had a good dry ice cover to protect them from oxidation.  Our team rocked!   This semi sweet red is almost.

It was quite an evening as we really got a rhythm down and finished up in a little over 3 hours. Which included a short pizza break halfway through.  Not bad considering both our bottle filler and corker claim to do just around 55 to 60 cases per hour. Our crew really rocked!

Now Erich will be busy labeling the bottles,  capsules will be added and on March 23rd the tasting room will be filled once again with Rocky's Red. A semi sweet, soft red wine that is a wonderful remembrance of our late great winery friend.

Thanks to our friends Jerry and Dwayne for lending us a hand. It was actually a lot of fun!  We'll be bottling our next wine very soon..

Here is our initial attempt at bottling:

Then realizing we still had 1,900 bottles we decided to use higher tech equipment  (actually the above was the last bit of wine that came from the bottling unit).