Bob Bressler
03-05-2011, 03:07 PM
There is an old adage that bottling is one of the riskiest days of the year for a winery. Nothing you do will make the wine any better, but a hundred different things can go wrong and, potentially, ruin the whole vintage.
We bottled our 2008 Cabernet and Young Vines last week. Everything looked good. The wine tasted great, all the bottles, labels, corks and capsules arrived on time. We were first up in the morning and ready to go! We ran a few bottles through the line to check everything and noticed that on some of the labels, the black “Bressler” was chipped. Hmm – after some quick research it turned out that when the labels were printed, the embossing process was turned up just a little too much and the black foil layer was punching through. What to do? There were no great alternatives as the bottling line was all cranked up and ready to go. We finally decided to bottle the wine as shiners – what is called fill, cork and capsule.
Now we had around 400 cases of wine that was not tax-paid (excise tax, that is) so had to remain in Bond. Our bond is at the winery, so as long as there was room, we could keep the wine there. But this is a shared facility and after a few days, there would not be room. That would mean shipping the wine in bond off to a bonded storage facility. A pain in the neck. Fortunately, the label company was able to redo the labels very quickly and we were able to get another slot for the bottling truck. So, this week we ran the full bottles through the line with the new labels. This time it all worked! Now we just have the discussion about who pays for all this…
I think I better understand why so many winemakers have gray hair.
We bottled our 2008 Cabernet and Young Vines last week. Everything looked good. The wine tasted great, all the bottles, labels, corks and capsules arrived on time. We were first up in the morning and ready to go! We ran a few bottles through the line to check everything and noticed that on some of the labels, the black “Bressler” was chipped. Hmm – after some quick research it turned out that when the labels were printed, the embossing process was turned up just a little too much and the black foil layer was punching through. What to do? There were no great alternatives as the bottling line was all cranked up and ready to go. We finally decided to bottle the wine as shiners – what is called fill, cork and capsule.
Now we had around 400 cases of wine that was not tax-paid (excise tax, that is) so had to remain in Bond. Our bond is at the winery, so as long as there was room, we could keep the wine there. But this is a shared facility and after a few days, there would not be room. That would mean shipping the wine in bond off to a bonded storage facility. A pain in the neck. Fortunately, the label company was able to redo the labels very quickly and we were able to get another slot for the bottling truck. So, this week we ran the full bottles through the line with the new labels. This time it all worked! Now we just have the discussion about who pays for all this…
I think I better understand why so many winemakers have gray hair.