Finished bottling the 2012 Vintage Cabernet Franc from the Columbia Valley. The pictures below show the machinery and process we use to bottle wine. On average we can bottle and label around 1100 bottles an hour.

Empty bottles arrive already in the box

Bottles get placed a on a short conveyor belt which sends them around a filling carousel

The hopper completly full of corks 

The wine level in each bottle is adjusted to a uniform height then sent through a corking apparatus

Bottles on the journey from corking machine to foiling machine

Lots of foils

Labels get applied

Bottles end the journey ready for consumption!

Unique and Famous Wines

Growing up with one of the most talented Washington wine makers, my pallet has been exposed to a diverse array of unique and interesting wines. To give you a taste of some of my most recent favorites, I have shared some pictures below. For future posts, I hope to write about some of my favorite wines from different regions around the world as well as wines you can find in local wine shops.

2013 Travel

Pictures from some of the wine events I attended across the country in 2013.

 SF Chefs Event: Wine and Food event in San Francisco

 Pouring at a trade event for our distributer in Hawaii

 Fundraiser event for Maui Cultural Event Center

 Tasting at McCarthy and Schiering with Stephen Tanzer

 WA Wine Commission event for international trade/media at the Columbia Tower, Seattle

 View from the top floor of the Columbia Tower

 Trade event pouring in Kansas City and St Louis, MI 

 Ohio distributor trade pourings (Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus)

 Pouring at the Whitepages.com anniversary event downtown Seattle

From left to right: Chris Peterson (winemaker at Avennia), Myself, Anna Schafer (winemaker at aMaurice Winery) and Master sommelier Shayn Bjornholm

2013 Crush

Crush went very well this season and the 2013 Vintage is already looking to be excellent. Fall harvest and crush are two very important parts to the winemaking process. Choosing when to pick the grapes and making sure they arrive at the winery in a timely manner is one of the most critical parts of the process. 

On a day to day basis, crushing requires making sure there is enough room in each tank for the amount of grapes arriving. We have several different sized tanks, because ideally each grape type should fill up to about 70-80% of a tank. Making sure all the equipment is clean and working is an obvious step but important because the faster the grapes get into the tank the better. Half ton bins of grapes are dumped individually into a hopper where leaves and bad grapes are picked out. The grapes then drop into a de-stemmer which knocks them off the stems. The final step is pumping the grapes into a tank.

Depending on the Vintage, crush typically lasts from September through October. Grapes ripen at different rates depending on varietal and vineyard.

 Grapes being dumped into the hopper

 Half ton bins of grapes

Juice from a fermentation tank (Photo by Sy Bean)

 Pump used for transfer grapes from de-stemmer to tank (Photo by Sy Bean)

Chris talking about equipment (Photo by Sy Bean)

De-stemmer

 Close up of grapes

2013 Vintage Winter Racking

Racking (or Soutriage) is a filtering/fining process in which the wine is moved from one barrel to another (or into a tank). Once a barrel is emptied of visibly clear wine, the barrel is turned upside down to empty the lees (deposits of dead yeast or residual yeast and other particles that precipitate) and then rinsed with hot water. 

Reasons for racking include: clarification, stabilization of wine, and removes the lees which can cause "off-flavors".

Everyone 3-4 months we rack the all of the wine from a specific vintage. Over each vintage will end up being rack several times before it is bottled. In the pictures below (Courtesy of Sy Bean) we are preforming the first racking of the 2013 Vintage.

Small Bottle Big Winery

In order to hone my photography and editing skills, I have created this post to highlight some of the unique shapes and colors found around the winery. The Photos were taken with a Nikon5200 with a AF-S nikkor 18-55mm lens. The editing program I am using is Adobe Elements.

 Bottling and labeling machine (Gai 1000W)

Grape hopper used during Fall harvest

 Trusty pallet jack

 Barrel of 2013 Sangiovese with percolator bung

 Barrel racks 

 Fir pit next to the winery

 Ladder tower to access upper barrels

 Inside of a fermentation tank

 Outdoor drainage system