For any size winery (especially a micro-winery like ours), bottling day is a big deal! Finally getting the wine in the bottle after almost 2 years from the grape harvest, is usually a long and busy day, with many hands "on deck" and a feeling of relief once it’s done!

I'm bringing you along on Bottling day of our 2022 Sollevato Sangiovese and you’ll hear:

• Jon Evino, the bottling line whisperer, share the super-fun story of how he acquired their unique bottling line
• The process of Bottling, corking, hand labeling and waxing close to 900 bottles (with love and laughter)

Our previous vintage, the 2021 Sollevato Sangiovese ,just received a Gold Medal and 92 point rating in the Orange County Wine Competition! Order online and Use code PODLISTENER for 10% off your order 

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A couple weeks after the ad stopped running, Paul Sobon from Sobon Winery up in the foothills called and said, we bought this vineyard and there was a winery

here, it's been out of business for 15 years, but in the barn is a machine like what I think you're talking about if you want to take the time to come up and look at it.

So I went up and sure enough, the machine had been sitting there for 15 years, was covered in every kind of awful thing you'd ever want to think of.

If you are a loyal Sip with Nikki listener, welcome back.

I see you and I appreciate you.

Thank you for being here.

And if you're new to our Sip community, hello, I'm Nikki and I'm so happy to have you here with us.

So first off, I actually need your help.

So today's episode is going to be the first in a series where I'm recording on location in the field where you're actually hearing things happening, not necessarily just sitting in a studio with a microphone.

And these are going to be sprinkled in throughout different episodes, because I think it's cool to take you with me on the road as I'm experiencing different things and to let the audio kind of put you in the moment.

So.

I mentioned two names.

I need your help.

Should we call it On Location Series or In the Field Series?

Send me a DM on Instagram at Nikki Lamberti or send me an email Nikki at sipwithnikki.

com.

Either way, I'm polling the audience and I'd love to know what should we call this series.

Where I'm taking you with me.

To kick it off with this series, something really, really special just happened earlier this week and I brought a microphone with me.

So if you're a regular listener, you know that my partner Michael and I have a small wine project called Solovato.

And we are in our fifth year of production of a very, very boutique wine of Sangiovese.

And this week we bottled our 2022 vintage, and it may not sound like much, okay, you put some wine in a bottle, but let me tell you, especially with red wine, but even with all wine, it is a painstakingly long process.

So these grapes that we bottled this week, as wine, were picked in September of 2022.

So that's coming up on a two year mark to make this product with love for you.

And so bottling day, whether you're big or small winery, is an exciting day because it's the culmination of all of that work.

And it's also a bit of a relief because once you get the wine in the bottle, It's a little bit more protected from spoilage and oxidation and things like that.

So when you bottle, there's definitely a sigh of relief that happens.

And I thought that it would be cool to bring you along to bottling day.

So what you'll hear is where we make our wine and where we were doing the bottling is a small winery in St.

Helena in the Napa Valley of California.

Yeah.

We do what's called a custom crush because Michael and I don't own our own winery yet, dot, dot, dot.

So we make it at Tres Sabores Winery where Julie Johnson is the owner and winemaker.

She's a mentor of mine and she invited us to make our wine there.

And Julie's husband John, we'll call him John E because his last name is very complicated.

But it starts with an E.

John Evino, as he's called, is a fantastic part of the team there and has really been a wonderful help for us with our wines.

And John's skill set, which is making wine, I think over 40 years, really comes into play on bottling day because as you're going to hear him talk about, they have this very unique bottling line that he found and that he operates.

And it's rare for small wineries to have a bottling line.

Usually.

You use a mobile bottling company that goes from winery to winery.

So the fact that Tres Sabores, where we make our wine, being a small winery, has a bottling line on site is huge.

But Mr.

Guy, G A I, as you'll hear he's called, because that's the Italian name of the creator, is a little finicky.

And so John is like the bottling line whisperer.

This is only the, uh, fourth time that we've bottled wine, and it's always, always an adventure.

So what you'll hear initially is us explaining the process, and yes, the audio is good, but you're gonna hear a lot of clanking and noise because that's what happens on bottling day.

We bottle 75 cases through this very special historic bottling line.

And then in a separate process, we go through and label each one on this mechanical labeler, one bottle at a time.

And then the last step, if you've seen our bottles, is this beautiful copper wax that we hand squeeze a little coin of wax on the top of every bottle.

So it's a very painstaking and manual process.

I want to give a shout out to my friends, Jen and Nicole, who let us recruit them for the day.

They were wonderful helpers and.

We're going to take you through bottling.

And if at the end of this you think, gosh, I'd love to taste this wine, you can purchase our wine on our website, which is solovatowines.

com.

I'll put the link in the show notes.

We can ship to most states.

And if you use the discount code PODLISTENER, we will give you 10 percent off for being a loyal listener.

So, without further ado, here we go with bottling day.

So it's bottling day.

Very exciting.

Almost two full years in the making with this 2022 Sangiovese.

It's a beautiful, warm day.

It is almost 80 degrees already.

And it's barely 11 a.

m., so we're gonna get about 75 cases of Sangiovese in the bottle.

Put her to bed.

Michael, bottling day.

How are you feeling?

Ready to go.

Alright, so talk me through, what's your job here?

What station are you on?

I am going to be emptying the cases onto the table.

They're upside down, so you've got to be very gentle throwing them on the table.

Someone decided to use a little fancy tapered bottle.

Then they tip over and they fall.

That's me.

I wanted the tapered bottle because it's sexy.

We're about

12

cases in.

And here, Mr.

Guy, humming along.

I am catching the bottles as they come off the line, filled and corked.

But they're still naked.

We'll go through and label them as a separate step.

We are humming along, watching these bottles get filled.

Um, it's like a carousel.

Like the carousel of progress.

And I have Two helpers with me today, Jen and Nicole are here.

Hi.

They're speaking into my cleavage so we can capture them closer because this process really takes a lot of hands.

And, uh, always great to have helpers.

And we pay them in wine.

And, you know, wine and sandwiches and hot sauce and all those things.

And it's great.

And love.

And love.

Of course.

Because it's me.

It's like, there's a very small window of time for me to catch these bottles as they come off, and then there's a very short runway.

So if I see something shiny, or try to take a picture, or talk to my friends, that's when shit goes down, literally.

So, I have to focus.

Catch these bottles.

But as John just pointed out, which I think is so cool, he said, how many winemakers do you know?

Touch every single bottle.

So listener, I am literally touching the bottle that you will purchase.

I've touched it a few times.

I'm tempted

to like go in front of you and grab one so you can't see everything.

Nicole!

She's gonna I touched the bottle and I liked it.

Silly girls.

That's it.

Alright, so let's hear about Mr.

Guy from John.

Yeah, so um,

He was one of the first hundred prototype machines that was made in Italy.

by this company called Guy, the family's name, G A I.

And, uh, one of the sons was a young engineer, and he was interested in creating a bottling machine.

It was kind of the first of its kind, where you had the filler and the corker together, running on one motor, and so they're always synchronized.

And by doing that, the machine was less expensive, and it took up less room, because you didn't have to have another piece of conveyor in between.

So, you know, better for little wineries.

And he went to his family apparently and said, you know, I need this much money in order to build the first hundred machines and then we'll take one to the trade show in Florence and, you know, we'll be in the chips.

And the family said it better work because otherwise We're screwed.

And so a fellow who owned Complete Winemaker, the winemaking shop, originally was in St.

Helena, and he was at the show in Florence and he saw this and he thought, wow, this would be great for little wineries who don't bottle all year long, you know, a week here and a week there.

And he bought 10 of the first 100, had them shipped back, and we had one at Robert Pepe Winery.

And As the winemaker there, I had to be able to run the bottling line because essentially the entire rest of the staff was either working with me in the cellar during harvest or working in the vineyard the rest of the year.

So, I didn't love bottling before I met the former guy machine, which was just like this one.

But, once you kind of got into the, uh, Sort of has a soul, like an old car, you know, it's all mechanical.

And so when we were looking to buy a machine for here, I put an ad in Wine Country Classified, and everybody who called had one that was quite a bit newer, and it was going to be 20, 000, 15, 000.

And finally, a couple weeks after the ad stopped running, Paul Sobon from Sobon Winery up in the foothills Called and said, we bought this vineyard and there was a winery here.

It's been out of business for 15 years.

But in the barn is a machine like what I think you're talking about.

If you want to take the time to come up and look at it.

So I went up and sure enough, the machine had been sitting there for 15 years.

Was covered in every kind of awful thing you'd ever want to think of.

And I called him.

I said, you know, it looks like the machine.

But until I get it into the shop and they try it out.

I don't know if I have a bottling machine or an enormous paperweight.

And so I could give you a thousand dollars for it.

And he said, great shot.

We're just, we're just trying to clean out the barn.

And so I took it over

to an expensive paperweight.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Took it over to the guy, uh, shop in Windsor.

And now 40 years later, you know, this being the original machine, all the machines are kind of the size of that group of boxes.

And they.

Still, the idea is, for the most part, they run on a few number of machines and it's all synchronized.

So, you can be doing 225 bottles a minute and still only have, like, three people on the entire line.

But, that said, when I went to pick it up, and they were getting ready for the trade show in Sacramento, so they had all these high speed rail looking lines in

there that they had put together, but all the noise was somewhere over there, and I followed the noise back, and everybody working there was in front of this machine.

And it was going around and one guy goes, We've never seen one like this before.

It's so cool.

And that was kind of the beginning of the end of me not having a connection to Mr.

Guy because it's just a, it's a beautiful thing.

I don't know, I can't explain it.

You guys are connected.

Never, never was modeling before.

But now it's

just, I feel like, and if I walk away for too long, something goes wrong.

It's like, Get back here.

You're bonded.

You're, um, imprinted.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So anyway, I was told this was the first guy machine that was ever sold, delivered, and paid for in California.

Woo

hoo!

And now there must be

thousands, thousands of them.

To

Mr.

Guy!

To Mr.

Guy.

Alright, so this is where it gets exciting, right?

This is the sound that we always listen for.

It's when you turn off, and you have to wait for the last of it.

Yeah!

We did it!

Alright, part two.

Now we are labeling on this very cool labeling machine one bottle at a time called

Plan B Cause we thought maybe we could put the bottles through on the big labeling line but the shape of the bottle Not so much.

So now we do it one by one.

And this thing has a little foot pedal, kind of like a sewing machine.

John wants to touch every bottle.

He's jealous.

So

after the bottles are labeled inside, we move to the third and final station, which is the waxing station.

And we put this, Beautiful little wax coin just right on the top of the cork.

So the, the cork is not quite flush to the top of the bottle.

It's dropped down just, I don't know, an eighth of an inch.

So we can put this beautiful little wax coin on the top.

And it's this custom copper wax that matches the logo and the label.

And we're literally pre melting the wax in a Fry Daddy and getting it liquefied.

And then we're spooning it.

Into this very ancient dinosaur German contraption that is a wax dispenser, basically, and it warms it, it's electric, and then it drops the wax in a really thin stream and lets you kind of release the lever to cut it off and just make it nice and neat.

So it's just that little tiny coin on the top.

The main reason we do it is because it just looks really pretty and it's something I had seen years ago and it always stuck with me.

But as our friend, Dr.

Hobie Wedler from a previous episode, Mr.

Ph.

D.

in chemistry reminded me the wax also changes how the wine inside ages because it slows down the oxygen that's in the wine.

Passing through the cork.

So there is a functional benefit to it, but I will tell you the main reason that we do it is that it's beautiful.

So at the end of that day, as you can imagine, there was a big collective sigh that we made it through, that everything cooperated.

We got through our 75 cases and now they can rest comfortably until we're ready to sell them next year.

In the meantime, you can get your hands on the previous vintage 2021 Solovato Sangiovese, which, at the time of recording this in June of 2024, we

just received this week, caught off the press, our first wine rating of 92 points and a gold medal from the Orange County, California wine competition.

So, uh, get it while you can.

We can ship to most states, solo up to wines.

com.

Use the code PODLISTENER for a 10 percent discount.

So grateful to Julie and John and the whole team at Tres Sabores, including Miguel, their assistant winemaker, for all that they do to help us make this dream a reality.

And coming up here soon, I'm going to have Julie and John on the podcast.

You can hear more about their amazing and inspirational stories.

If you enjoyed this and any other episodes, please take a moment in Apple or Spotify to leave us a rating.

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And take two minutes and leave us a review, a couple sentences.

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And listening to this podcast, appreciate you listening and as always, sip well.