Bottling our 2017 Vintage

We've come a long way since we bottled our first vintage, our 2015 Chenin Blanc. I wrote about it in my March 31, 2016 blog which I called We Bottled Our Wine. At that time, we used nitrogen to push the wine from the keg and a beer gun to put the wine into the bottle, which we then corked. The blogpost has detailed information and photos to show how we accomplished this to bottle a mere 1 case of 750 mL and 2 cases of 375 mL bottles.
Here are a few photos from our 2016 setup:

Our wine has been steadily increasing to the point where this year, my husband (he is Procurement) bought a Mori filler and an ELVAmac Rapid 15 corker. We received our Mori filler on July 9th, so there was no excuse for us not to bottle sooner, but as with any new equipment setup, there is a learning curve, so we put off confronting this task until the 11th hour!

Here is the setup in 2018. There are many similarities to the original setup, but now we are tethering the filter housing.

Once we had the setup, we tested the Mori filler with just water. My husband found a small leak in the filler that he and our supplier had to troubleshoot. We were finally ready to bottle on Wednesday, October 10. We were really bumping up to our harvest day, October 14, Sunday and we ran into a problem. Our filter kept clogging. Troubleshooting involved putting in another 0.45 micron filter, which again clogged and then stopping for the day to gather our thoughts. It doesn't help to work then tired.
The next day, we decided to try our 1.0 micron filter, which will leave behind all yeast and particles larger than one micron. When we did that, we had no problems! We were in bottling production!