DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We started with a floor-to-ceiling stack of empty wine bottles, three barrels and a dozen carboys full of wine from last year, and four huge bins of crushed grapes. The day’s agenda: bottle all the finished wine (86 cases!) and press all the new grapes (200 gallons!). Oh, and drink lots of wine — in the name of quality control, of course.

We had 20 people in three separate assembly lines. The first group managed the press: hauling buckets of crushed grapes to the press, filtering the juice, and pumping it into storage — some into oak barrels, some into glass carboys. This required some complex dance maneuvers. Once grapes had been poured into the press, the juice would run… so someone would have to hold the sieves and watch the catch basin, which would quickly fill… so someone else had to be ready to swap basins… but the full one would be needed shortly, so it would have to be emptied… so someone would have to hold a filtering screen above a plastic tub, which would quickly fill… so someone would have to pump off the juice into barrels, which would quickly fill — especially bad, because spilled juice in the cellar attracts vinegar bacteria, which could contaminate the entire winery, and nobody really wants 200 gallons of red wine vinegar, I don’t care how many salads they eat.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of hosing out of screens and tubs and wheelbarrowing off of empty grape skins.

I spent my time in the bottling group. The bottler is an ingenious device, a gravity-fed pan with three spigots. You have to suck each one to get them flowing, but so long as you don’t let them pull air, they’ll pour wine all day. Hang a bottle on each one, and the wine automatically starts to drain into it; when the bottle is full, the flow stops.

Full bottles were handed to the corker, who drove another manual device — basically a real long lever with a bolt at one end to push in the cork. Corking turned out to be nearly foolproof, although we did have one early bottle that somehow ended up with two corks in it. That may have been a ploy though (“I’ll take this defective one home with me!”).

We needed five people: one to feed bottles to the bottler, and cart away boxes; one to fill the bottles, an “expediter” to manage the passage of bottles to the corker and from there into boxes — this was me, which is why the position has a cool title — one to run the corking machine, and one to feed corks to it.

Standing in the middle of this provided a vivid education in process management. I wrote a nice review of a great book about process management last year; see The Goal. All those lessons came back immediately. There were as many opportunities for bottlenecks as there were people in this assembly line. If the bottler is fumbling to open a case of empties, or if he has nowhere to put the full bottle because the corker is behind, then the whole process stops. But optimizing a single stage would only reveal the next bottleneck in line. We made that line sing, I can tell you, but not without some concentrated effort. (The fact that we were all quaffing fresh vino wasn’t helping anything.)

Seriously, though, it was really satisfying to realize that fishing corks out of a bag doubled the time it took to put a cork in the bottle. This was the system’s biggest constraint, and it dictated the throughput of the entire operation. We appointed a “cork feeder;” within two minutes the backlog of full bottles dropped to zero… providing moments of valuable free time for the expediter to refill his tasting cup.

A third crew managed labeling: another 5-7 people doing a variety of things, but somewhat slowly because the first person in the line was doing too much: sliding the little foil lids on the bottles, lifting them from the ground, then holding them inverted in boiling water. Because my team was operating so efficiently we were able to take over the first two steps of this process, speeding up the labeling operation too. Woo!

Anyway, we bottled and boxed two cases of rose, about 70 of Cab/Syrah, and about a dozen of Pinot. I didn’t do one damn thing from my to-do list today, but it was the most productive day I’ve had in six months.

See photos of the entire process in my winemaking gallery.