Many Kiwis pick up a bottle or two of their favourite wine at the supermarket with their weekly shop, but few will have seen the painstaking process of how the liquid winds up in the bottle. Reporter Oliver Lewis visited The Bottling Company, in Marlborough, to find out.
Pruning on a frosty morning, the magic of the winemaking process, it all culminates in a cavernous warehouse south of Blenheim among the whir of machines and clatter of glass.
Every hour 6000 bottles are cleaned, filled with wine, capped, labelled and packed into boxes ready for export to sauvignon blanc thirsty customers around the world.
On an average day, The Bottling Company aims to bottle about 35,000 litres of wine, siphoning the precious liquid from tankers deposited by clients outside their Riverlands Industrial Estate base, just south of Blenheim.
Director Matthew Elrick says it takes about five minutes for the river of green glass to snake its way along the line, passing through the various, gleaming metal machines along the way.
A winemaker by trade, Elrick knows how important bottling is to the quality of the finished product. He describes it as the final peak, which, done right, should mean a winemaker tasting from the bottle can detect the same flavours they saw in the fruit, months, if not years, prior.
"It's amazing when you think about all the work that goes into making a bottle of wine. From the van loads of workers all rugged up on cold, frosty mornings pruning, to the winery guys that work their magic - it's a massive job," he says.
The upstart company has been flat-out since its first test run in early February. Elrick and his fellow director Stefan Newman saw an opportunity for another contract bottling facility in the region, hired the warehouse, bought machinery from Italy and hit the ground running.
Across the concrete floor of the workspace are piles of stacked pallets, each flush with about 1000 bottles. These are taken by forklift to the first machine, a depallatiser, where the process begins.
The bottles are lifted automatically, a row at a time, to a holding space which pushes other bottles down onto a conveyor belt headed towards an enclosed series of machines, the rinser, filler and capper.
Elrick has nicknamed the cap elevator - which feeds the caps into the capper - 'Goose' in reference to the character from the Tom Cruise film Top Gun, so to complete the reference the filler has picked up the name 'Maverick'.
When they enter the rinser, the bottles are flipped upside down and sprayed with a burst of nitrogen gas to clean them.
Nitrogen gets squirted in again when they hit the 30 revolving filler nozzles on 'Maverick', which stores the wine in a central steel bowl kept topped up by a pump connecting to the waiting tankers outside.
As the bottles are raised to the level of the filler nozzle the seal settles around their necks, creating a vacuum which draws out the nitrogen, used to prevent oxidisation, and fills them with wine.
Then it is on to the capping heads. Spinning steel wheels press the caps onto the thread on the bottles which are then cut using a laser coder which engraves the date, time and batch number in small print near the bottom.
"In theory it's all really simple, but in practice there's a number of moving gears and parts - they're very technical bits of equipment," Elrick says in explanation, obviously pleased by my sense of wonderment.
After the bottles go through the laser coder, the conveyor belt takes them to the labeller, which is capable of sticking the adhesive brand names and other information on at a rate of 14,000 bottles an hour. There are also four heads, so up to four stickers can be applied at a time.
One of the last steps in the process is the Hamson Overpacker, which takes the bottles and packs them into boxes, seals them with glue and sends them on their way to the final machine, a palletiser.
Elrick says the computer settings give up to 100 different packing options. I joke it looks like Tetris, seeing the boxes slide into their alignment on the pallets. Not quite, he says, the palletiser always gets it right.
Once they get wrapped in plastic, the pallets of boxed wine are stored in the warehouse, which The Bottling Company leases from TNL Freighting. The shipping and distribution company takes the wine and sends it off, to appear on shelves in New Zealand and abroad.
Throughout the entire process, Elrick emphasises the importance of quality control. When the wine first arrives, it is tested in the on-site laboratory to check the level of things like preservatives and CO2 to make sure it adheres to the specifications of the client.
Other checks are carried out on samples along the line, something Elrick says is key. Winemakers put a lot of trust in a bottling company, so he and the 10-strong team make sure they earn it through diligence, he says.
"For some things like aged reds it can be almost a year-and-a-half or more before it even gets to the bottling stage, which is why quality control is so important," he says.
"There are all these people who have done so much work and they're trusting us to make sure every bottle that goes off the end of the line is perfect."
- The Marlborough Express