The very best bottling runs are very boring bottling runs.  And that is NOT what we got last week!!  We had two days to bottle 4000 cases of wine of 11 different individual packages.  A monumental task no doubt, but normally no problem with our great Cellarmaster Steve preparing the wines and veteran  mobile bottling pro Harry running the truck.  All was well and good until 778 cases in when, ZAP! down goes the vacuum pump (the machine pulls a vacuum in the neck of the bottle before inserting the cork – how cool is that?).  No vacuum pump, no bottling….. but with no way to reschedule the team jumped into action.  Trips to Tracey, Stockton and Fairplay followed…..some poor guy in a machine shop in Stockton stayed up ALL NIGHT to rewind the motor and by 8:30 the next morning we were back on track. 

It has always amazed me just how complicated filling, corking, labeling, and foiling a bottle of wine can be.  That’s why we LOVE working with Harry – with his years of experience he is never flustered and always gets the job done.   When I asked him last week how many bottles of wine he had run through his truck over the years, he casually answered “A little over a billion I figure”…….Billion….with a B…..WOW!!