Bottling helpers

On Friday, Hubby and I both took a day off to work at a local winery that we enjoy.  They were bottling reds - Barbera, Tempranillo, Petit Verdot, and Mourvedre, to name a few.  Over 12,000 bottles of wine.

 

 Its safe to say we have zero experience doing anything at a winery besides drinking wine.  But we enjoy getting to know the winemakers and learning new things so we figured "why not?"  Plus, it was fun to meet other wine club members.

 

 This particular winery doesn't own their own bottling line, so a big rig pulls right up to the winery.  It was our job to label the boxes of empty bottles, stack them close to the line, flip the bottle over on the conveyor belt, re-load the full and corked bottles, tape the boxes up, stack them on pallets, and store them in the warehouse.  WHEW!  

Very hard work! 

Once the line got going, we were working at record speed - the production line was cranked up to high.  Thank  goodness for cooler weather and no rain!

Cases of empty bottles, stamped and ready to go.

 The bottles, ready to be flipped over on to the conveyor belt and filled.

 The winemaker, John, getting ready to lift filled pallets to be stored in the warehouse.

Hubby and I worked several job rotations - here he is helping to make sure all of the bottles are fully filled at the end of that particular varietal run. We helped them bottle almost 1100 cases of wine - everything you see below, shrink-wrapped in green.

 If you ever get a chance to work at a winery - bottling, picking grapes - do it!  Its fun to see how the winery works from the inside even though it is super hard work.  The owners paid us in wine, tee shirts, and pizza, and we met some fun folks and got to know the winery employees a little more.  We even recognized some people we had met here at another winery on Mother's Day - small world - and found that we were members of some of the same wineries.

Fun for sure - but I think I will keep my Monday through Friday job!