Bottling

A Busy Time in the Winery

Most of the time the winery is a relaxing, peaceful place. However, bottling is always a more active and busy scenario.

Lining up pallets of empty bottles, mixing the base wines with a little sugar and yeast ready to go into bottle and preparing the empty stillages ready to hold the wine that over the next five years or so will become Sussex sparkling wine.

We were lucky enough to come upon a secondhand bottling line that looks fantastic in the winery - a real statement piece of equipment. Possibly a little over specced for our size winery (it’s used to filling millions of bottles each year rather than the 10,000 or so that we put through it) we feel we have given it the perfect home to retire to.

An almost military operation, if everyone knows their job the day flies by and before you know it there are a few thousand bottles ready for storage.

Good planning and an eager workforce make a busy and demanding day fly by.

A quality piece of equipment makes light work of the task.

Once bottled, the wine goes into storage for a minimum of five years to age on the lees in bottle.