FRICTION BURNS & OPTIMUS WINE

Nobody likes bottling. By necessity, it’s the most automated thing we do, which means that quite a lot tends to go wrong. We don’t have a bottling line, so we book the bottling truck. The bottling truck is used by almost all the independent vignerons in this neck of the woods. Only one independent winery that I know of has its own bottling line, and it’s got its own problems.

A bottling line is modular. It comes in bits and pieces. There’s the pump and filter, should you need to filter. We tend to filter based on the weather. A low-pressure system during bottling – a risk in the winter – can kick up the sediment in the bottom of the tank. We marry all of our wines in tank before bottling – it’s just easier to bottle from them than from barrel. So if the weather’s good, there will be little or no filtering. If the weather’s bad, finer filters need to be used because there’s bigger chunks of stuff floating about in the wine. After the pumps and filters comes the actual bottling module, where the liquid is piped into the glass vessels with a last little bit of sulphur. We use sulphur to stabilise our wines. I’ve mentioned it before. We don’t apologise for this. The phrase: ‘Contains sulphites’ was chosen by a committee of American politicians, including Strom Thurmond (a former segregationist), because it sounded scary, and they hoped it would discourage drinking. Sulphites are a natural byproduct of fermentation. Sulphur dioxide, when added to wine, acts to perturb the effects of oxidation and prevent microbial infection. That’s a good thing. Loads of people think that they’re allergic to sulphites. Most of the time they’re not. They say it gives them a terrible hangover. I’m pretty sure that’s the booze. Unless they get a hangover from eating dried apricots, or any other dried fruit, because there’s far more sulphur dioxide in those than there is in a bottle of wine. Recently, there’s been a movement promoting wines without SO2 added to them. This movement has caused a great deal of controversy within the wine world, not least because the tag that has been given to these wines is ‘natural’. By calling a certain group of wines ‘natural’ you’re suggesting that any wines made that don’t fit in that group are somehow ‘unnatural’, which is nonsense. In any case, there has been many a bust-up amongst wine folks with the pros and the antis all making some interesting arguments. Me? I’ve had some good wines without sulphur and I’ve had some abominations. I’m not a big fan of dogma, so I probably fall somewhere in the middle of the whole thing. I just want to help make great wine. SO2 helps that.

 

Anyway, I digress. Bottling.

I remember working in a wine shop in the lead up to the Christmas rush, waiting with trepidation for pallet after pallet of wines, whiskies and assorted other festive liquids. A fully loaded pallet is, or should be, 56 cases. If the cases are six-packs, then it’s 112 cases per pallet. It was a small shop. It still is, actually, and the sight of two pallets waiting to be brought into its tight confines in short time could ruin an otherwise cheery morning. It often seemed an insurmountable task. A pallet was pretty much the largest measure of quantity we used. Occasionally there would be chat of shipping a whole container (which holds several pallets), but those chats were rare and inevitably ended with a shrug and a ‘nah’.

When I worked as a sommelier, pallets of wine were rare and impractical. We received only two in my 14 months at the restaurant, of wine we shipped directly from France. It took some planning to clear room in the cellar, with various nooks and crannies excavated to stash a six-pack here and there.

The last few vintages I’ve worked in France, I’ve grown accustomed to the scale and volume of the wine we make. Fifty and sixty hectolitre tanks are filled over the course of a day or two of emptying comportes full of grapes into the de-stemmer, which leads to the pump, which leads to the tank. Remontage through fermentation, racking, daily density samples and tastings meant that those tanks were not idle once filled. We continue to interact with them throughout vinification. I grasped their size and dimensions within the boundaries of winemaking.

At the end of a day’s work we’d often open a bottle of a previous vintage and maybe comment on how this year would be different. Would it be better? I understood, intellectually, that the liquid in the tank would someday be the liquid in the bottle. It’s such an obvious thing, and yet there was a level of comprehension that was missing; a blank spot between the tank and the bottle.

 

The bottling truck arrived and in spite of the occasional technical difficulty the bottling line was set up. It was modular, with lots of bright stainless steel and more moving parts than seemed practical. Filters, pumps, conveyors, front labels, back labels, bottles, boxes, corks, caps, etc. all present in staggering quantities. I should point out that, sadly, a bottling truck is just a regular truck. It’s not a specially modified truck with a bottling line built into it, like a giant transformer. That would be amazing. I was disappointed when I discovered the truth (as was one of my editors); that a bottling truck is just a truck with a load of modular bottling equipment in the back. All of it gets taken out and during bottling, it’s just an empty truck. In my head, somewhere, maybe in southern Italy, someone has invented at transformer-like bottling truck. It would look vaguely steampunk, and be called Optimus Wine.

A bottle of wine is a small thing, perfectly formed for its task, yet the number of things that go into it to give that impression and provide that perfect form, is daunting. For me it was, anyway. Our job was to bottle around 15,000 litres – we needed to clear space in the tanks for this year’s harvest.

My station on the line was boxes. I had to unfold cases and lay them on the line for my partner to fill with six bottles, then lay down the divider atop those so that the last six bottles could be placed on top of the divider. My partner then folded the case shut and pushed it through for it to be sealed, coded and loaded onto a pallet. We switched places for the last tank, with me handling the bottles. None of this occurred at a leisurely pace. We packed three cases a minute, thus filling a whole pallet in less than 20 minutes. Before my very eyes the tanks I knew only in and of themselves were emptying into bottles and the scale took me aback. Just one of those 60 hecto tanks equalled 8,000 bottles of wine. That’s almost 12 pallets worth. Mas Cristine is not a huge winery. A 15,000 litre bottling line in the Roussillon is at best small-to-medium in terms of volume. And yet for this former wine merchant, the one who would sigh in exasperation when a delivery driver showed up outside the shop with two pallets, to bottle and box over 20 pallets worth of wine in the space of a day and a half seemed extraordinary.

After that last day of bottling we went home and, as usual, cracked open a bottle of something. I brushed the label with my thumb and traced the seam of the glass up to the foil cap. The cork removed, I rolled it over in my fingers and squeezed it, feeling it give slightly. I nosed my glass, looked again at the label and thought that a bottle of wine is a small thing.

After the liquid goes in the bottle, the cork (bouchon) gets stuffed in and then the foil and then the real bastard bit of the whole thing, the labels. We use both front and back labels, and they have to be calibrated so that they are precisely centred on each other. Why is that a big deal? It isn’t, not really, because it’s the wine inside the bottle that’s the important thing. But at the same time, if you can’t get the labels straight on the bottle, then how can you be trusted with the wine on the inside? It’s one of those stupid little things that seems like it shouldn’t make a difference but does. If you’re an average punter gazing upon the shelves in your local independent wine merchant and you stumble upon a label that looks like it was stuck on by someone who didn’t give a shit, all things being equal, you wouldn’t buy that wine. I wouldn’t blame you – I probably wouldn’t buy those lazy assholes’ wine either.

So we recalibrate. We have empty, dummy bottles for such things. It involves running the empty bottle through a number of times whilst fiddling with the settings until once again the front and back labels are in sync. Then you repeat a couple of times just to make sure. Then you start the whole thing again and hope it works.

The labels come on huge rolls with thousands upon thousands of labels. I’m always kind of curious how long they would be if you unravelled them. I could work it out, but I’m happy just to remain curious, rather than spout some improbable distance like those guys who take great joy in telling you that your lungs would cover a tennis court if fully unfolded.

Finally, sealed, full and labelled, the bottles come out on a conveyor belt and need to be boxed. Boxing should be a two-man job, though quite frequently it’s one man. The boxes are all flat-packed, and so have to be unfolded quite quickly. If you’re in the zone, you’re dealing with bottles pretty much as they come out and you can box up about four cases of 12 a minute. You then push the box through this machine that both seals it with tape and prints the cuvée on the side of the box.

The cases are then stacked on a pallet until there are 56 of them, at which point the pallet is wrapped in loads of giant cling film which is then sealed, much to my initial horror and amusement, by a massive flaming torch that shrinks the film tight around the cases, holding them fast atop the pallet for whatever future they may have. Some will go to the States (those ones have special labels on the back, complete with Surgeon General’s warnings and that sort of thing).

Bottling is kind of like everything else around here. You do it until it’s done. You do it as the friction burns sear into your fingers as you flip bottles by their necks into the boxes, trying to keep up with the machines around you. You only have the bottling truck for the day, and so all the wine you’re planning on putting into bottle has to be put into bottle there and then. Breakages, delays, re-calibrating the labels (the latter has to be done a lot) all stretch the day out into evening, but you still don’t leave until the tanks are empty and the bottles are full.