Bottling runs at Amity are broken down into two seasons. Spring for whites and organic wines (Eco Pinot and Eco Foch) and Late Summer/Fall for reds. As of this moment, we are in the midst of our Spring bottling run. The first wine bottled this year was our Rose’ of Pinot gris followed by Eco Marechal Foch, Auxerrois, Estate Dry Riesling, and the Wedding Dance Riesling. The good news is that five wines are in bottle already. The bad news is that they are the smallest lots. We have the larger lots of Pinot blanc, Gewürztraminer, Chardonnay and Eco Pinot noir still to do.

Bottling days tend to be rather assembly line type-work days. Depending on the amount of wine we need to bottle, we usually get in to the winery between 7 and 8am. We start off by sanitizing our bottler/corker and cleaning the pump and the hoses that move the wine from the tank to the bottler. At the same time, we sterilize the filter that the wine passes through on the way to the bottler/corker. The depth of the filter depends upon the wine we are bottling. For whites it’s a .45-micron sterile filter. For reds, it’s usually in the 5 to 20 micron range. Once all of the equipment is sanitized, assembled and tested, it takes a crew of three people to bottle the wine. One person sparges the empty bottles with Nitrogen and puts them on the bottler’s carousel. Another person takes them off the carousel once they’ve been filled and corked, then wipes down the bottles and puts them into case boxes. The last person puts labels on the case boxes and stacks the cases on a pallet. He or she also supplies the first person with empty glass bottles and keeps the corks from running out. It sounds kinda complicated but it really isn’t. We’ve done it so often we’re like a well-oiled machine, so long as the equipment is running properly.

This year’s bottling crew has consisted of the following Amity employees:

Michael – Who will work harvest with us this year and currently works in the tasting room and winery part-time

Charles – Who is best friends with our Cellar Supervisor Vince, has a tattoo of the State of Washington, and he also has supplied most of the tunes courtesy of his eclectic I-pod

Bob – Who has taken time off from the vineyard to help

Neil – Who helps get us set up, adjusts our ever-so-quirky bottler/corker, and runs the machine from time to time

Darcy – Who prints of labels for the boxes, fills in on the line for Neil and buys us donuts for nutritional purposes

Vince – Who has been on vacation so far but is looking forward to helping now that he is back