Making Wine- Part 2 – The Bottling Process

Back in April, we made a batch of Verdicchio white wine at out favorite local winery, InVINtions A Creative Winery, Video #17 – INVINtions, A Creative Winery with our friends Mike and Lauren. A Lot of Wine, A Lot of Fun After we made the wine, we had to let it ferment for a couple of months before we were able to bottle it.

Finally, the time had come. The wine had fermented and is just right. Now it is time to bottle it up. We gathered up Mike and Lauren, and Janet and Bob (they were supposed to be there with us for the making of the wine too) and off we went for our bottling adventure.

The winemakers of the future, tasting a chilled glass of Verdicchio before bottling up our very own batch.

We have been going to InVINTions for many years, so we are good friends with all the staff as well. Lori and I are raising our glasses to toast each other.

And here we are with Tamika and Lori.

And now the time has come for the bottling process to begin. Here is our batch of liquid gold. Each batch makes roughly 28 bottles.

Devon is giving us a quick tutorial before we begin.

This is the end result we are looking for. Simple … Wine goes in, CHEER comes out.

Larry, Janet and Bob and I have all done this many times before, so we let Mike and Lauren choose what parts they wanted to do, since they are both newbies at this. Mike chose to bottle the wine. Devon is explaining the bottling process to him.

With just a little guidance from Devon, Mike was soon a pro.

Lauren was the one who had the important task of corking the bottles after they were filled. She was the corker. Before she started corking the wines, she had an inspirational hug from Mike.

Both Mike and Lauren are taking their jobs very seriously.

Bob was in charge of putting the labels on the bottles, Larry was sealing them up tight, and Janet was carefully placing the bottles on the cart. I was supervising it all while also taking pictures of everything.

The bottling was working like clockwork. And of course, we were sipping our wines all throughout the process as well. I think tasting is a necessary part of the job, or at least so I have been told. Soon, the bottles were done. Here we are, with our fearless leader Devon, showing off our finished wine bottles.

We placed our wine bottles on the magnets for 30 minutes to age them properly. Then they will be ready to drink and enjoy. We used a label we had used before, The Tree of Life. When you make your wines, you also get to create your own label.

Here I am, like a proud parent, showing off all wine.

We worked up an appetite after all our hard work of bottling up the wines. Once we were done here at InVINtions, we all went out to dinner to celebrate. I will save that one for later though.

Wine makes everything better, and it is best when shared with good friends and good food.

Stay cool, stay safe and stay well Everyone. ‘Til next time.