Corvus Cellars is a longtime Trysk client and proud member of the Red Mountain AVA. When they called their old friend Stephan Martinez, Founder and CEO of Trysk, to volunteer at their annual bottling party, we decided it would be great to take some pictures and really show our readers how the process of getting wine into the bottle works.

Only the biggest wineries actually own their own bottling facility. Smaller local businesses like Corvus hire a bottling-plant-on-a-truck.

This impressive achievement of engineering represented a massive shift in affordability and convenience when it first came onto the scene. An entire bottling line in the back of a semi!

Randall Hopkins, Owner and Winegrower of Corvus, recruits a team of friends and family to volunteer on the line. Step one? Caffeinate the crew! 

Step two: assign responsibilities. Duties break down into different repetitive jobs, just like any other assembly line:

• Unload the empty bottles
• Load the bottles into the machine
• Drop a capsule onto each bottle after fill and corking
• Keep an eye on the labels
• Pack cases with full bottles
• Run the cases through the tape machine
• Palletize the cases for storage

With this intelligent delegation, a dozen people can bottle a thousand cases in four hours!

Martinez says, “If the labels aren’t cut right, or if the liner doesn’t work, it can really ruin everything. It’s really fast! It’s kind of like I Love Lucy with the chocolates!

Martinez volunteers on a bottling line as often as he can to remind himself that this process is the end goal of a labeling business like Trysk. “I regret not doing it earlier in my career,” he adds, “Now we send new employees to a bottling line as soon as we can.”

Corvus owner Randall Hopkins says that the best part of bottling day is the camaraderie. “There’s music playing, good people are talking and having a good time, and at the end of the day you have this real and tangible thing in front of you. It feels like a real accomplishment.”

Hopkins throws a big celebratory dinner at his home to culminate the day. This year’s menu was short ribs, indulgent selections of library wines from his personal collection, and the new Corvus Cellars Rosé:

The perfect way to celebrate this fast-paced and high-stakes annual project.