If you spend any amount of time drinking wine or visiting California wineries, you probably know at least the basics of winemaking, grape growing, and/or my personal favorite: wine appreciation.
But how many people give any thought to the final step of the winemaking process> After all, wine doesn’t just magically appear in a bottle.
Turns out almost every winery hires an outside company to tackle the non-glamorous, yet critical task of bottling—an expert such as Steve Rasmussen, owner/operator of SLO Bottling Services, Inc., based in Pismo Beach.
Talley Vineyards’ original winemaker, formerly with Sierra Madre Vineyards in Santa Maria, Rasmussen knows a thing or two about wine. He’s even taught winemaking classes at Cal Poly.
So it makes perfect sense that he would be trusted by more than two dozen California wineries to bottle their wines year after year.
“Right! I think that gives me an advantage. Definitely it does, and I understand what everybody wants,” Rasmussen said. “We like it to be a non-eventful thing. We don’t want excitement when we bottle. We want it to be nice and boring and everything goes smoothly.”
Summer is the busiest time of year for Rasmussen’s bottling business, “because wineries want to empty their tanks before the harvest comes, and they want to maximize the barrel aging on a certain lot of wine.”
When a winery is ready to bottle a large lot of wine, Rasmussen gets the call to bring over his Peterbilt truck-towed, custom-made trailer that houses his stainless steel mobile bottling line.
“We have two full-time operators that operate the equipment,” Rasmussen said. “But the winery provides an eight-person crew to run the bottling line.”
I caught up with Rasmussen’s bottling trailer a few weeks ago at the picturesque Brander Vineyard near Los Olivos. Brander bottled 3,600 cases over two days: reds one day, whites the next.
“The business is very competitive, so you need to focus on the things a winery should be focusing on, and that’s quality and control. And certainly bottling is something that can be farmed out,” said award-winning winemaker and winery owner Fred Brander. “Steve has the expertise, so it just makes sense to have someone come and do it.”
Rasmussen described the process step-by-step: “The empty bottles get dumped out on what we call the dump table. Then they get inverted, upside down, and blown out with nitrogen gas or carbon dioxide gas. This does two things; it gets rid of any pieces of glass or cardboard lint, and it also purges the bottles of oxygen so that when the wine goes in, it doesn’t go into bottle shock.”
The empty bottles appear to march one-by-one along the conveyer belt. The wine, in a tank in the winery, is pumped directly to the trailer. “The first machine it goes to is the filler, which has 20 spouts on it, and that’s where the individual bottles get filled,” Rasmussen explained. “And then right after that, it gets a cork in it—or we also do screw cap—and then the label is put on.”
If the bottle gets a cork, another machine places a tin capsule on top. The crew then boxes the wines, 12 to the case.
It took each bottle of Brander’s latest 2011 au Naturel Sauvignon Blanc the typical amount of time, no more than three minutes, from empty to full.
“That’s our best Sauvignon Blanc. No oak barrel aging. We keep the wine really cold,” Brander said.
Au Naturel will be available in the Brander tasting room, on N. Refugio Road, starting July 1, at $30 a bottle.
Brander knows of which he speaks. The local wine pioneer says he likely planted the first Sauvignon Blanc grapevines in Santa Barbara County in 1975—vines that are still producing today. His winery makes six different Sauvignon Blancs.
“We like to showcase the range of capabilities that that variety is endowed with,” he said. “It has so many possibilities.
“The main thing with Sauvignon Blanc is to deliver that freshness in the glass,” he continued. “Refreshing quality is paramount with Sauvignon Blanc.”
Brander prefers making white wine, partly because the process is much shorter than for reds, which require more caretaking. White wines can be harvested, processed, bottled, and for sale in the tasting room within a year.
“And it will pay for itself faster, too, which is another consideration,” he said.
Red wines usually take longer because they are often barrel aged for an extra year.
Bottling finalizes the winemaking process: “Once you have it in the bottle, basically it’s beyond your control, except for storage conditions. It’s a big relief,” Brander said. “Sort of akin to sending your kids off to college, you know, ‘Hey, you’re kind of on your own.’”
“For the winemaker, the exciting thing about bottling a wine is the wine is out of your responsibility and now it’s in the marketplace,” Rasmussen said. “It’s always kind of a joyous occasion for any winemaker to bottle a wine because it’s kind of the end of the road, where we have to watch over it, so there’s a natural high that’s involved with bottling.”
The joy a winemaker feels is almost matched by the joy that we, the consumers, experience when we pour that newly filled bottle into our glass to enjoy the fruits of his labor.
Sun food and wine writer Wendy Thies Sell prefers bottles of wine to boxes. Contact her at wthies@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 14-21, 2012.
