Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Wicked wine job

Every once in awhile a job comes along that's just plain unfortunate.

One of our fledgling wineries here in the Okanagan just released a 2003 Meritage that had to be pulled off the shelves after only a couple weeks. Customers were complaining about cloudy wine. In fact, there was a pretty dense layer of streaky, swirly goo near the bottom of almost every bottle.

It tasted great. But you can't sell wine with the bottom few inches looking like paint.

Turns out that gelatin (a common fining agent)was added to the wine shortly before bottling and there wasn't sufficient time for clarification. The wine went to bottle unfiltered.

I was asked to help with the "fix".

So it was:
collect wine.
ship wine to undisclosed location.
assemble crew to uncork, empty bottles, wash bottles, do not damage labels.
filter wine/adjust SO2.
filter again enroute to bottling line.

Owner of said wine hopes it will taste the same. Not much chance of that.
It will probably be better.
bottle and palletize
ship back.

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