Inside the Bottling Line at Suveg Cellars
When many people think of bottling wine, the phrase conjures up images of automated contraptions filling bottles of wine, corking them, with finished products drifting down a conveyor belt to be boxed. But the process of bottling is far from automated at smaller wineries like Suveg Cellars. All of our wines are bottled by hand, which can be painstakingly hard work. Today we're taking a trip to our bottling line at Suveg Cellars, one of the many processes that provide a glimpse of the hard work and dedication we put into each and every bottle.
To bottle our we need at least 3-4 workers in the bottling room: one for sanitization, another for machinery working, and the last several workers for corking and bottling.
Sanitation is a key component of bottling wine. Without carefully sanitizing every bottle, harmful bacteria can find their way into our bottles. This is why our sanitization process is thorough, as we dedicate one winery worker to sanitizing bottles until bottling is complete. Pictured below is bottler Tina Leuer, sanitizing and drying bottles.
Next in the process, Winemaker and Owner Craig Suveg ensures the wine retains the highest possible quality by using argon, an inert noble gas, to keep the wine in the bottle filler and wine in the bottles from coming into contact with oxygen. The argon is heavier than oxygen, forming a layer atop the wine and preventing it from oxidizing.
The empty bottles are then attached to the filler, where they are then filled with exactly 750 ml of wine.
After a bottle is filled, it is then moved to the corking apparatus to be manually corked. A Suveg Cellars etched cork is placed in the loading section of the corker, and then a member of our staff applies the necessary torque to push the level down, and send the cork into the bottle.
From here, bottles are boxed are labeled at a later date. Even our labeling is done by hand, making the entire wine process at Suveg Cellars manual. Our wine will continue to be made by members of our community, and crafted with care as we continue to grow.
