Filtration and bottling of wine
Bottling of wine 18/24 months after harvest
Filtration of wine before bottling.
If you come at this time of year, you will often see the bottling, let’s see how it goes.
Many people don't know that in France there is a law that determines who has the right to call himself castle, rather than domain, closed or other.
The Bordeaux Court of Appeal, in its judgment of 30 May 2006, established that: "The term "Château" must be reserved for actual existing wine farms with cultural autonomy, the latter meaning that the farm must include vines and buildings suitable for wine production, with the wine-making equipment (cellar, vat room. ..) to treat the harvest separately, to preserve and treat the wine from the plot.
It follows that if one does not bottle and store the wine at the estate, you could not use the term "bottled at the estate" in your label and, in general, if one does not have the opportunity to bottle and store the wine, one could lose the right to the appellation "castle".
In practice, I often participated in the bottling at the estate with the castle’s machines, but this poses problems.
First of all, it is necessary to amortize the cost of the machines and have suitable premises for storing them (clean and not wet).
On the other hand, staff must be trained in bottling, gluing labels, capping, placing capsules, creating cartons of 6 or 12 units, etc.
This is without counting the difficulties related to the bottling of bottles of different shapes (for example "Baccus" instead of Bordeaux, sometimes used for special or atypical wines), magnums, double magnums, the use of wooden boxes and, especially possible machine breakdowns and the presence of spare parts.
Indeed, for a large part of the year, filtration and bottling machines remain unused.
For these reasons, even large and important castles, where the money to invest in machines is certainly not lacking, prefers to rely on third-party companies for these processes, hence the presence of large trucks perfectly and rationally equipped for all requirements.
This spectacular and noisy process usually takes place 18 to 24 months after harvest, because all the Saint-Émilion grands crus must be aged for at least 12 months in wooden barrels (usually French oak from the forests of Limousin).
But hurry, if you want to attend this interesting event, know that most of the castles have already bottled, and you could taste the Saint-Émilion 2022! ecoexcursions.fr
Comments