May Winery Update
Jeremy Mount, Winemaker
As the vineyard has now sprung into life this month, the winery is preparing for the final stages of the year’s cycle: bottling.
Bottling is usually split into two stages. In April we bottle, label and box all our still wines. Then during the summer months usually in June or July we bottle the sparkling wines.
This is called ‘Tirage bottling’ when a combination of yeast and sugar is added to the sparkling base wine tanks, mixed, and then bottled for their second fermentation. As you may remember, last year was a very low yielding year, so we have decided to combine the two bottling sessions into one, spread over two weeks.
We are ‘single estate’ here at Woodchester which means we don’t buy fruit in from other vineyards to bulk up our tanks.. The benefit of this is that we only process the best quality fruit produced in our vineyards. This year this has meant that the winery is not full to capacity but what we have in tank is of an excellent quality.
The bottling process is always a logistical challenge, especially as we have an access limit for vehicles delivering palletised goods. We’ll be bottling approximately 50,000 bottles this year so we need quite a large number of pallets of bottles as well as labels, closures, boxes, etc, and make sure we get them all delivered in time for the mobile bottling line that Bevtech will be bringing up at the end of the month.
There is also the minor/major detail of getting the wines blended, stabilised, filtered and ready. We are not making as many different wines this year but there is one very interesting new blend we have developed from combining varieties. This is a small run of a blended white wine, a combination of Solaris, Siegerrebe and Ortega. The Solaris and Siegerrebe were pressed and fermented together and have developed into a fruit forward refreshing summery wine available to wine club members only over the summer. Once wines are bottled they go through a short period of time called bottle shock, where the wine takes a while to settle down so the exact release date is yet to be confirmed. We look forward to you trying it soon.
