Bottling Our Wines at Jonathan Edwards Winery---Part 2

On Monday, I wrote about Bottling Our Wines at Jonathan Edwards Winery---Part 1. Day 2 of bottling began with filtering the rest of our 2020 Chenin Blanc and ended up with the filtration of our small lot of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. In the afternoon, we began our first bottling. Here is what the bottling line looks like.

For our bottling, we thought that having both 750 mL bottles and half bottles (375 mL) was a good idea. So, on the first afternoon of bottling, we bottled both our 2019 Auxerrois and our 2020 Auxerrois ending up with a total of 50 cases of 750 mL bottles and approximately 25 cases of 375 mL bottles. We were pretty happy about that but the rest of the bottling loomed so we asked our friend, Barry if he could come to help us on Wednesday afternoon. On Wednesday morning, we bottled 29-1/2 cases of our 2020 Chardonnay which ended up being all 750 mL bottles. Barry came promptly at 1 p.m. and helped us to bottle all of our 2019 Chenin Blanc which ended up being 90 cases of 750 mL and 42 cases of 375 mL bottles!
Not only was Barry a great help, but he brought music with him and the beat kept us moving. After the bottling there was even time for a little sampling of the 2019 Chenin Blanc and some laughs!

On Thursday and Friday, Jonathan Edwards enlisted one of his people to be the Barry-equivalent, even providing us with music! We were able to bottle the rest of our wine which included our 2020 Chenin Blanc (196 cases of 750 mL bottles, 119 cases of 375 mL bottles) and 2019 Cab Franc (8 cases 750 mL bottes, 2 cases + 8 bottles 375 mL bottles) and 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon (6 cases 750 mL + 6 cases 375 mL bottles).
I learned that there is a specific way of arranging the two bottles sizes on the pallet. For the 750 mL bottles, a pallet can hold 84 cases, 14 cases on each level and 6 levels. Here is an interesting fact. For a pallet with 84 cases of wine bottled at 750 mL, that translates into 200 gallons of wine. For the 375 mL bottles, a pallet can hold 17 cases on each level. I'm not really sure how many levels would make a typical pallet.

At the end of the bottling, we were all feeling a little robotic. My husband, who was in charge of sparging the bottles with nitrogen and putting the bottles on the filler came home and put our two glasses of water on our dispenser at the same time, filling one glass with cold water and the other glass with hot water!
We thank Jonathan Edwards, Barry, Jay and Dan for all of the help they gave us for an entire week! Words cannot express our gratitude.