Labeling day!

Woohoo, something new! So, since Gourgonnier sells their wine to several importers in the US, and since the wines going to each importer needs to bear a back label saying who it was imported by, the wines here are not labeled when they're bottled. They go into bottle and are stored in bins like this.








So when an order comes in, the machine gets all set up with labels. The label depends of course on which wine, but also on which importer. Today we did orders for Diyonysos Imorts in VA and for Michael Skurnik Wines in NY. Both orders were 2007 Rouge Tradition, but Dionysos likes the new labels, and Skurnik likes the old labels, so we did the first order (3,000 bottles labeled, boxed, and palletized in 2 hours) then we switched labels and did the other. Since we weren't bottling today I didn't get to see the whole machine in operation, but basically the way the whole thing works is, the wine is fed via hose to the bottling machine, which of course has bottles in it. There bottles are filled then fed to the corking station by conveyor belt, then via the same conveyor belt it gets a cap, there are two units that tighten the cap on the neck of the bottle, then it's transferred to a spinning platform where it gets the front label, then the back, then back onto the conveyor belt and out of the machine, where it's packed by hand. The full case then gets stuck through a unit that tapes it top and bottom, and the finished box gets a sticker bearing the name of the importer, and it goes on the pallet. And that's pretty much my whole day right there.

Oh, and for lunch we had cured ham. Yay!