Bottling Adamo 2007

The barrel racks got here on Friday, so we were able to bottle on Saturday.

We bottled the Adamo 2007 (sangiovese and cabernet franc blend) and then we moved the Jorro-Ma 2008 (syrah) and half the Evidente 2008 (pinot noir) into their French Oak barrels.
What we're left with is four secondary fermentation drums containing the sangiovese and pinot noir that goes into the Trovato 2008.
You may like to enjoy some video of bottling, corking and capping that is on our facebook space. On this blog we offer the following pictures of the winery and some activity.
On Wednesday we shall be finishing off the bottling of Adamo 2007 and finally transferring Trovato 2008 from secondary fermentation into ageing.
Also, thanks to those who were at Whole Foods, Lane Avenue, on Saturday afternoon. Michael was released from winery hard labour to do the tasting there. We know it was a success as he had to send Katrina back up to the winery to get more wine to sell.

Here you can see us preparing a French Oak barrel. We re-use our barrels as they're way more expensive than American Oak and old European wineries re-use them too. We clean, gas them, when not in use, then re-hydrate them to swell them up again before cleaning before re-use. Barrels leak like sieves if they've dried out so re-hydrating is necessary unless you want to lose a lot of wine.

Below you see our growing wall of wine. In the foreground are the prepped French Oak barrels that will receive the secondary fermentation from out of the blue fermentation drums.

This is our bottle filling machine. Wine is pumped into the reservoir at top, then wine is dispensed into bottles via the 4 spouts you see at the front. The bottles rest on the shelf below the spouts whilst filling. From here, the bottles are passed to the corker (no pictures of corker here, but a video of this is on facebook).

After the cork is inserted into the bottle, the bottle then has a tin foil cap placed on top of it and the bottle is inserted, neck first, into the capping machine. See video on facebook.

The wall of wine grows again.

However, we still have some wine left in secondary fermenters that will be used to top-up the barrels over the course of the next 12 to 18 months (these are the demijons at back, sealed with olive oil). The blue fermenters will be emptied by next Saturday.