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2006 Bottling TimeMy Day at CDA Cellars - May 24, 2006What a day. Today I volunteered to hlep at Coeur d'Alene Cellars with the bottling of last year's crush (Kim & Jim Waddle and Kathy & I went down to CDA Cellars just as they were starting the grape crush last September). Usually I would help with that the crush, but they didn't let me know in time. This fall I will help with that process also. It will be fun to follow the wine all the way through the process. After today, I'm only buying boxed wine , LOL. They allow us wine club members to come down and help make the finished product. There are about 15 or so volunteers helping in all aspects of bottling. It was fun and a happy experience. We had lunch served and drank freshly bottled wine. We bottled about 20,000 bottles of wine today and we will do another 20,000 tomorrow, finishing up on Friday. The goal is to do around 49,000 bottles of wine over the three days. Today we bottled 4 kinds of white wine and one red. They now bottle 11 kinds of white and red wine at Coeur d'Alene Cellars. They bring in a semi truck that is the bottling facility. My job today was to flip the case box of nine empty wine bottles onto the conveyor belt, the bottles go from there to the filler, corker, labeler and back around to our end of the semi truck for the volunteers to reload the boxes full of wine, then go to the tape machine and down a conveyor belt to be restacked. www.cdacellars.com is their website. If you are interested in finding more information. It is FANTASTIC wine. I think it is some of the best I've ever tasted.
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Today at the winery - May 26, 2006Today we had to re-run 8,100 bottles from yesterday back through the bottling machine. Yesterday the labels were wrong and jammed the machine over and over and over again. The label company re-made 16,000 labels and air shipped them in. They arrived about 10 AM this morning. We now had to flip the cases (all 680 cases) with 12 bottles each over and run them back through the bottling machine. Yesterday I flipped 48,000 bottles or 4,000 cases of empty bottles down the line - today's were FULL bottles. We received lunch, dinner, and samples of wine for our labor all three days. Yesterday I received three bottles from the current bottling run. And today another three bottles to add to my CDA Cellars inventory. My new Coeur d'Alene Cellars inventory inclues: a 2004 Boushey vineyard Syrah (absolutely fantastic), a 2004 Opulence (very good and $40 a bottle), a 2004 Stillwater Creek Vineyard Syrah, a 2005 L'Artiste (very very nice), a 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon (oh my, this one is fantastic) and a 2005 No 6 White. We bottled 10 kinds of wine and I was able to bring home 6 of those varieties. We (I) am looking forward to going down and working on this Fall's Crush, then of course there is the next Spring bottling process. On Wednesday the winery was filmed by our local TV station. This morning I made VCR copies of the newscast and gave them to the owners of the winery and to the bottling truck operators. The website for the bottling company is http://www.signaturebottlers.com/index.html My response:
The people who run the winery and the volunteers were very impressed
with Bob ... of course, we all know he is a hard worker. He
didn't break any of those empty or full bottles. The guy he was
working with said each of the other years (the winery has been open 3
years), someone broke a bottle doing his job.
He left the house at 7:15 am and got home 8 pm the first two days.
He came home looking exhausted with a huge smile on his face so I know
he had fun. Today he left around 8 am and got home about 1:15 pm
full from lunch.
The first day he did come home with huckleberry spilled all over his
new Bloomsday shirt, new shorts, socks, and shoes (which luckily all
came out.) The huckleberry topping had been on a piece of
cheesecake he was eating.
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