And before you even think it….. no, I don’t mean me!

In the period between finishing the fermentation and starting the pruning, it’s traditionally the time of year when we have a bit of a clean out in the bodega.

This year we have attacked one of the storage rooms in the eaves of the building, that, over the years, had become choked with unused materials and equipment most of which is past its sell-by date.

Our big clean up yielded (amongst many other things), this strange looking piece of kit. At first I had absolutely no idea what it could be used for, at least until I examined it a bit more closely. It turns out to be the head for filling bottles by hand, only six at a time. How things have changed – our new machine for example, will handle up to 3,000 bottles per hour (which is still slow compared to some).

If it takes us nearly a day to bottle a tank of wine with our new machine, I cannot imagine how long it must have taken with this – perhaps we had to provide our staff with sleeping bags?

And before you even think it….. no, I don’t mean me!

In the period between finishing the fermentation and starting the pruning, it’s traditionally the time of year when we have a bit of a clean out in the bodega.

This year we have attacked one of the storage rooms in the eaves of the building, that, over the years, had become choked with unused materials and equipment most of which is past its sell-by date.

Our big clean up yielded (amongst many other things), this strange looking piece of kit. At first I had absolutely no idea what it could be used for, at least until I examined it a bit more closely. It turns out to be the head for filling bottles by hand, only six at a time. How things have changed – our new machine for example, will handle up to 3,000 bottles per hour (which is still slow compared to some).

If it takes us nearly a day to bottle a tank of wine with our new machine, I cannot imagine how long it must have taken with this – perhaps we had to provide our staff with sleeping bags?