It's Bottling Season!
The days are getting just a little bit longer and here in San Francisco we recently experienced a string of days when temperatures easily reached into the seventies. Spring is coming quickly. Although the fall harvest represents the busiest time of year at a winery, with head winemakers and interns alike working eighteen-hour days, the spring bottling season is certainly a close second.
This spring, we could not be more excited to release our first grape-to-bottle wine, Enviar Rosé. We hand-picked the organic Barbera grapes back in August at the beautiful Nascere Vineyard in Butte County. From there, we brought them to a small winery in the Bayview District of San Francisco to craft this dry, refreshing rosé.
Fast forward six months, and the cellar today is once again bustling with activity. Cases of bottles, ready to be filled, are stacked on pallets reaching to the ceiling. Still more pallets seem to be arriving several times a day. A week out from bottling day, we racked our wine. The process of racking moves the wine from the tanks and barrels where it has been resting into separate, clean tanks temporarily. The yeast and other solid particles are left behind, and the wine is now clear in appearance.
When leaving these new tanks, the wine will be lightly filtered. By running the wine through a filtration pad, we remove any remaining particles that could cause a number of flaws after bottling if left in the wine.
The wine is now ready for bottling. Like most wineries, our facility doesn’t have its own bottling equipment, but rather schedules a mobile bottler to come a few times each year to bottle wines for multiple clients. This is an efficient, cost-effective way of going about things.
Our rosé will be bottled in slightly taller, skinny bottles named Hock bottles for the town in Germany in which they originated centuries ago. The clear glass will showcase the beautiful pale salmon color of the wine too. Showing notes of strawberry, cranberry, white pepper, and sage, this light, crisp rosé is one you won’t want to miss. We look forward to having it up on the SipSend website soon!