Bottling 2017 Three Feathers Vineyard Wines
August 21,2018 was the day designated to bottle our 2017 wines that were harvested in early October; our Three Feathers Pinot Noir, and a new wine, the Cuvee Virginia Pinot Noir.
A tremendous amount of preparation goes into this moment. While the wine is resting comfortably over the winter our resident artist and photographer, Elise, is laboring to produce the perfect label to express our product. Christine is writing descriptions for the label backs. Once the label designs are finalized, they are submitted to a Federal regulating board, the TTB, to ensure that the proper government warning is correctly shown on the label and the alcohol content, upon which liquor taxes are based, is recorded. The TTB also reviews wine label descriptions for accuracy and clarity with regards to the geographical location of the wine and its AVA.
Our labels are then sent to a well-known label printer in Portland. Wine bottle labels are printed in one continuous roll, front to back, based on the requirements of the label machine which spins the bottles front to back for adhesion. In the meantime, Dan Duryee our winemaker at Lady Hill is busy orchestrating filtration (read our previous article Stirred, not Shaken).
The bottling apparatus is housed in a mobile truck trailer operated by an independent company, Signature Bottlers, who service many regional wineries. The inside is a fantastic feat of engineering (see our video)! The empty bottles are fed in one end on a conveyor belt that fills the bottles with wine pumped from the winery, installs (in our case) the screw cap, and puts on the labels.
The bottles then circulate back to the beginning where human hands put them in cases. A machine seals the case which then races down a shoot to the arms of workers below who smack a label on the case and stack them for shipment. The entire process, 2,500 bottles for Three Feathers Vineyard, took about an hour!