Christening Our New Bottling Line

Occasio is a small winery by any measure. Our annual case production rarely exceeds 1000 cases, and many of our small lot wines are bottled with fewer than 50 cases. I am comfortable with this level of production. It enables us to select only the finest fruit, perform long, slow fermentations, and spend considerable time with maturation. The only downside to small production is bottling. Bottling trucks must be scheduled months in advance, and it is never possible to know exactly when a wine will be ready. That is why it was essential to bring  bottling in house, so that the wines, and not bottling truck availability, would rule our calendar. That is why, early this year, I decided to contact one of the leading names in bottling, Criveller Corporation, to design a dedicated facility for our small production needs.

Our facility requirements are strict: complete sterility, ability to control the atmosphere in the bottle headspace, and minimum agitation of our wine. Our new line delivers on all of these, and more.

We put our line to the test last week, bottling a hundred cases of our 2012 Zinfandel and 50 cases of our 2012 Malbec. Problem free and gentle on the wine, our new bottling system is one of our most important investments for assuring your enjoyment of our wines.

Look for the release of our 2012 Zinfandel next spring, and our 2012 Malbec sometime in 2016.