From Vine to Bottle

 

Last Thursday  was a  terrific day!  I was invited to attend the bottling session at Spangler Vineyards in Winston.  A number of Spangler wines were ready for the final step in the process of turning fruit to wine and the bottling truck had been ordered for the day. 

Some wineries have their own bottling equipment but many especially smaller wineries where winery space is at a premium opt to hire a bottling truck when the time comes for this important step.  This mobile assembly line is housed in the back of a big truck  that can be driven to any winery location at any time. Contained inside is the equipment necessary for getting the wine into the bottles, the corks inserted, the capsules on top (that’s the foil that covers the top and neck of the bottle) and the labels adhered to the front and back of each bottle.

I arrived late morning and by the time I got there things were well on their way.  Volunteers were scattered about in the truck along the assembly line each with one job assignment. Some were responsible for putting a cork atop each bottle and others were packing the completed bottles into cases while others were sealing the boxes and stacking them on to pallets.  I could not help envision that famous I Love Lucy episode where she and Ethel are working in the candy factory and the assembly line starts to speed up way beyond their ability to keep up. Candy is flying and Lucy and Ethel are in a panic! Of course nothing like that occurred this time and I am happy to report everything appeared to go off without a hitch.

After I spent some time witnessing the well orchestrated bottling, Pat Spangler was able to slip away for a bit and we ended up in the tasting room to try a few wines.  I am a huge fan of Pat’s wines.  Big, bold well rounded reds and lovely, well finessed, fruity whites.  I so appreciate the attention given to subtle oak and in some cases as in his Chardonnay, no oak at all.  Pat is a master blender and over the years honed his craft of bringing just the right wines together in just the right amounts to really take them to a world class level.  The medals, awards and accolades his wines realize are too numerous to mention here but are evidence of his talents.  I went home with Malbec, Petite Sirah, Cab Franc, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and his beautiful Sauvignon Blanc.

And to top off the wonderful time spent at Spangler Vineyards, my husband and I had another terrific experience.  Needing lunch and wanting to try something new we stopped at the new Indian restaurant, Flavors of India, located right by Big Lots in Roseburg.   With the guidance of both Jessica our delightful waitress and Raghu owner/chef we ordered several different dishes and each one was excellent.  We had enough left over for dinner that night so we were able to take our delicious day into the evening.

I can not tell you how happy I was to hear of an Indian restaurant opening here.  Growing up and living in a more diverse area finding restaurants featuring foods from all over the world was as almost as easy as finding a Mc Donalds.  And I took advantage of the availability of such culinary diversity by making Vietnamese, Korean, Indian,Thai and Japanese foods, mainstays in my diet. For me I feel very much about food as I do about wine.  Variety is the spice of life.  We certainly have that in our wines.  So glad to see us moving in that direction with our restaurants.