Bottle Shock.

Well, after a week of filtering and finishing the wines we finally bottled today.  We now have over 600 cases down in the basement almost ready for sale… after they get over their bottle shock.  I think I’m in bottle shock.  The fact that we won’t have to label or cap the bottled wines is unbelievable.  I keep wondering about the free time I’m going to have. (Caw, caw, is that the Black Crow???!!!)

How are we able to do it?  Luckily the bottling went well with only a few mishaps so overall I’m pretty happy.  We had a great crew of people out, Ang, Carol, Dave, Erin, Luke, Storm, Ken, as well as Ben and I.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  Our lovely sister Rosalind took Miwa to daycare and entertained her afterwards as well as entertained Ru-chan.  On top of it, Val took care of  Ru-chan for the morning.  And Tak and Mitzi  roused themselves from their jetlag stupour to help with Ru-care.  Seriously people, we could never do this without help from the family.  Never in a million years.  We also had a wonderful lunch from the folks at Gowlland Harbour Resort (whom I called up and asked if they could do that for me and they did, nice people that they are, thank you Mariana and crew!).  It was seriously needed after hauling the cases all over the place.

The boys from Artus were super good and got it done.  With their expert operating skills and our amazing crew, we churned out over 600 cases in about 5 hours!  Consider that if we did it ourselves we would be doing it over several weeks and still labeling and capping a year later.  Case in point, I labelled the last of the 2012 Ortega and Black Crow a week ago.  Not much of that left yay!

Now, we’re all going to sleep.  Good night.  Will post more pictures tomorrow, here’s a teaser.IMG_0328