Bottling in Tenuta Amadio

Hi everyone,

I am very excited to share with you my first hands-on experience in a winery.

Wednesday I had the chance to go help in the bottling process in a winery in Monfumo, Tenuta Amadio.

A friend of mine works there and last week he asked me if I could come over to help with the bottling, I was thrilled about the idea and jumped on it immediately.

Tenuta Amadio's vineyards

I got there early, at 7.15 am; the truck with the bottling machine was already there and after 20 minutes the three technicians came in and started opening up the container and setting up the machine.

We started setting up the pallets with the empty bottles near the front end of the machine, ready to be loaded into it; we moved the boxes at the end of the machine where the bottles would come out; most importantly we set up some gazebos to have some shade when we worked!

The bottling machine on a trailer

We had to bottle about 6800 bottles of Prosecco DOC "Monfumino", 1450 bottles of Prosecco Asolo Superiore DOCG Extra Brut and around 2000 bottles of Sparkling Pinot Noir Rosé (not Prosecco); the only problem was that, because of the raw materials situation right now, the right format bottles were not delivered. This meant we had to bottle all the wines in the bottle format for the Prosecco DOC - not a big problem - but the boxes were made each for a specific format, the Extra Brut and Pinot Noir Rosé bottles are slightly shorter and wider than the one used for Prosecco DOC "Monfumino", this meant that the boxes were not closing properly and were very hard to put on top of eachother on pallets.

First of all, when the machine was set up for our bottle and labels format we flushed the machine with water to get rid of any dust or residues; once that was done we started pumping the wine.

At this moment all the tubes and nozzles are filled with water, so we needed to flush the machine with wine; we attached a hose on the housing that would otherwise pump the wine into the bottles and rerouted it into a vat, at first only water came out (obviously) but, as minutes passed, the proportion of wine coming through was higher. We took a sample of wine from the tank and started tasting that and confronting it with what was coming out of the bottling machine. Once satisfied that what was coming out was actual Prosecco we disconnected the hose and fired up the bottling line.

Bottles being washed and dried with compressed air

Wire cages being applied and corks being pushed down getting their "fungus" shape

Alluminum capsules being applied and rolled tight into shape

Prosecco DOC "Monfumino" on pallets

At first the bottling is very slow, the technicians have to make sure that everything is working properly and that the corks, wire cages and aluminum capsules are coming through and are properly lined up; same thing goes for the labels, they have to be centered and the LOT number has to be visible and printed on the right spot. Once the technicians were satisfied they started slowly increasing the speed while carefully monitoring the temperature of the wine coming into the machine.

The wine came out of the tank at about 5°C, by the time it reached the bottling line the temperature was up to 11°C sometimes peaking at 15°C (this was caused by various factors, mostly mechanical friction while being pushed through the pump and pipes, but also because the outside temperature was over 30°C). The higher the temperature the bigger the problems, if the wine is "hot" it creates a lot of foam once its pumped into the bottle, so the flow has to be regulated in such a way that it is more gentle thus foaming less; furthermore this also causes some bottles to explode inside the bottling line while they are being corked, creating a few headaches!

Bottling line up and running, the bottles on the floor had problems with label allignment. We re-run them through the lableing part of the machine

I was stationed at the end of the bottling line, I picked up the finished bottles and put them in boxes which  were then closed using a machine that applied scotch tape on both the upper and lower part.

I also took turns putting them on pallets. At a certain point it was all a bit hectic because the bottling machine started to go really fast once the wine was cold enough to push harder. I was pulling bottles and putting them in boxes super fast and they almost started overflowing and falling over!

Once the Prosecco DOC "Monfumino" and the Prosecco Asolo Superiore DOCG Extra Brut were bottled we switched to the Pinot Noir Rosé; at this point we had to go through the whole process of "rinsing" all the machine with the rosè wine and tasting it to confront it with a sample coming from the tank.

A bottle of Prosecco Asolo Superiore Extra Brut coming out of the bottling line

We started bottling at around 9.30 am and we finished at 6pm since we had a few bottles exploding due to the too high temperature and we had to lower the speed when they were coming out too fast. 

Once the bottling was done we started flushing the machine first with water and then with steam to clean and sterilize it.

We disassembled all the pipes and filters and cleaned them; we filled the filter with water, metabisulfite and citric acid to disinfect the cartridges and to keep them moist so they could be reused for the next bottling operation.

Once everything was done and the bottling technicians hitched up the container to their lorry and left me and my friend started cleaning the tanks with hot water and the next day they would have been filled with "soda" (NaOH solution) to eliminate any lees or tartrates left inside. Then we washed the floor and brought all the pallets with the boxes inside. In the end we left at around 7.30 pm.

It was a hectic day and I worked very hard (I still have a sore back!) but I had loads of fun and I am really glad I got the chance to experience this first hand!

I'm hoping they will call me for the nex bottling in July and during harvest time to help them in the winery with grape reception, pressing and all the fermentation operations.

I will keep you posted!

Thanks!

Dino