Kiaora all, and welcome to what will now be a regular update from the flight deck here at TBC.

I will also post these on our Facebook page which runs under 'The Bottling Company' or  'Matt Elrick' so feel free to check that out for some incredibly interesting facts about bottling, and some incredibly witty humour, and some spectacular photos of our surrounds.

But first, some technical stuff:

Filterability!   From my perspective this is worthy of a lengthly dissertation, but for the purposes of keeping your interest I will be brief.  We use the Sartorius automated FI unit to test filterability.  I have noticed, and therefore am now collecting data, that a filterability of 1.18 on our unit results in increases in membrane pressure during a bottling run, and it is pretty consistent, at about 0.05 Bar per 5000L.  At this stage I do not see any irreversable damage to filters at 1.18 or below, but I am going to be monitoring this rather closely now.  If your wine is less than 1.18 it will not block our filters, so if you are aiming for sterile filtration, this is where we need to be.  Get in touch if you have any questions or want more information.   I will present a paper on this at some stage - it might provide some scintillating Christmas reading.

Micro monitoring.  I have added an article in the Resources section of our client home page which was written by the AWRI and is a very good summary of industry procedures, quality assurance and bottling sanitation.  It is a good read and I encourage you to have a look.  In the nutshell, we test micro growth on finished product to ensure there are going to be no changes to the wine as a result of micro-contamination during the bottling process.  We pre-empt this by sterilising the line prior to bottling, using sterile filters and monitoring the effectiveness of our cleaning procedures.   All designed to allow us all to sleep at night knowing the bottled product will not be compromised.  This too is a topic worthy of its own dissertation, and this will also follow at some stage - perhaps for you to take on holiday after vintage next year!  Get in touch with me if you want to know any more about what/how or why we do what we do.  I find it interesting and love nothing better than talking about micro organisms and how much better they have made the world.

Some humour to finish (I wanted a joke about wine but I find Dad jokes way funnier):

                 "After dinner my wife asked me if I could clear the table.  I needed a run up, but I made it."