Labor day was a busy one at CLC, for both the production team and the tasting room staff. With ripe fruit and bottling to be done, Labor Day was not a holiday this year for production. Today I helped with the bottling of our 2008 Santa Cruz Mountains Pinot, which was the original wine of CLC that was made with the grapes from the backyard of the CLC's founders in Saratoga. Now there are a few additional vineyards that provide the fruit for the '08's 2400 case production.
Bottling is a very streamlined process for us with the Bay Area Bottling mobile service. By streamlined I do not mean fun or easy (bottling 28,800 bottles of vino gets a tad, um, repetitious), just very trick if you will. Bay Area Bottling is owned by CLC, and provides bottling service for not only us, but many other wineries in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Napa, Paso Robles and the Gilroy area. Other than operating the program and setting up the machine, which is done by Dimitri and Plamen (they run the bottling unit), there are 5 other jobs to be done... emptying the bottles to be filled, two people putting the full bottle into the cases, one person stacking 64 cases onto a pallet, and one person wrapping the cases and loading moving them with the fork... I got to do all the jobs but the fork, and probably moved about 500 cases of wine at 40lbs a pop... I will be sore tomorrow.
Jason and Steve pressed 8 tons of SB grapes... I will do grapes tomorrow to break things up. Looks like it will be all SB grapes this week, as the Viogner have slowed up a bit in ripening.
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