This year’s bottling adventure began with the tanked wine; 120 gallons of Chard i nay. If you love soaping, scrubbing and rinsing, winemaking is the career for you. And even though I love cleaning, we enlisted the assistance of a couple faithful and curious winos. The stack of empty glass was daunting to be sure, but a waiting cooler of icy cold malted beverages convinced our helpers to stick around.
T’was grand to dig out some equipment that we only get to play with once each year. That’s just long enough to forget the tricks learned last year. And another year brings some new toys too. Our new bottle rinsing apparatus was a successful purchase. The dedicated hot water wash down hose was also quite awesome, if you’re into that sort of thing.
A couple infuriating pieces of equipment stuck around from last year. During that last bottling, I would have paid any amount of money for functional bottling canes. 3 months later they weren’t so bad. 9 months later they worked great. 2 minutes into this year’s endeavor, it all comes back instantly. Somehow these things are still around to drive me to drink my work in progress. Yet we finished filling and corking 50 cases the first day.
J.H.
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