When the harvest comes in, wine from the current vintage is bottled. Wine leaves its hiding place in barrels and in a few hours it will be ready for shipping. It all has to happen quickly.

At Paul’s vineyard, where mainly white wine is made, wine from the previous year is bottled a week before the current year’s harvest.

The empty bottles move forward, clinking, on a conveyor belt, and the wine comes in from the vat on the other side, drawn out by a pump. It then goes through a distributor which fills about a dozen bottles at a time. The bottles continue along the conveyor belt and are corked. The whole process takes place in a closed glass case.

The machine was a large investment, but it was worth it, given the amount of wine that needs to be bottled. Paul could have called in a bottling sub-contractor, but this would have meant bottling on fixed dates. With his own machine, he can bottle wine whenever he wants. The machine’s throughput is 1,600 bottles per hour, or 13,000 bottles a day – it is not a big machine, but one which is suited to its purpose in any event.

In the next room the bottles are labelled – that’s the final touch, the house label. After that the bottles are packed and then dispatched. Already pallets of 2005 Rully have been readied for a customer in Belgium and are waiting to be shipped.

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