Bottling wine is always an exhilarating time of year. Getting to see all your hard work and effort finally lead to a product that you can drink is both exciting and stressful. To add to this excitement, we bottle our wines out of the back of a 50 ft long semi-truck. With help from Signature Bottlers, our wine goes in one end of the truck, and comes out the other, neatly packaged and ready to enjoy.
Since the early beginnings, we have utilized a mobile bottling truck to bottle all the Red Lily wines. Considering we are a small boutique winery, it made more sense for us to use a mobile bottling service than to have our own bottling line in-house. We typically only bottle once per year, so being able to bottle through a third party rather than spend the money on our own assembly line is very helpful for a small business like ours.
Bottling has also turned into one of our favorite days of the year. While the process itself is long and tedious – sometimes resulting in stacking 80,000 pounds of wine (sorry Riley), the aftermath and reflection on a hard day’s work is an incredible feeling. Sitting by the river with your (usually aching) feet in the water and a glass of wine in your hand is pure bliss. We have been extremely lucky to have such great staff and volunteers over the years who make bottling possible. Some people have been helping bottle since we opened our doors in 2011. It takes a village, and we have been blessed with the best friends and volunteers we could ask for.
We just recently finished bottling for the 2022 year! We were able to bottle 2,000 cases of wine in less than a day. Sadly, once the wines are bottled they must sit for a short time before they are ready to be sipped and enjoyed. This is due to something known as “bottle shock.” Bottle shock causes the flavors of the wine to be slightly off for a short period of time (usually a few weeks or less). Giving the wines some time to stabilize after bottling allows for those flavors to get right where we want them.
Be on the lookout for some new wines coming later this summer!
