3 marca, 2023
One of the questions our guests often ask us is – do you have your own wine? From now on, we can proudly answer – yes, we do! We have just finished bottling the Casa Portagioia wine. What excitement!
When you visit Casa Portagioia you will see an idyllic picture full of olive trees, flowers, lavender and cypresses, and vineyards. Not one, but three. This is the farming part of Casa Portagioia. Equally exciting as welcoming our guests.
There are three vineyards in Casa Portagioia. Two of them are merlot, one is the classic Tuscan san giovese. Our vineyards are managed in an ecological way. We don’t use any chemicals. We do a large part of the work by hand. We try to do what the Tuscan farmers of old did.
„Patrick, the bottles have arrived. I have already ordered the bottling equipment. We start on Friday.” I was so enthusiastically greeted one February afternoon by Marco, the owner of the canteen that creates the wine for us.
Why was Marco so happy about the arrival of the bottles? Well, in the last few years there has been a global bottle availability problem! As it turns out, Ukraine is one of the big producers of such products. Poor Marco has been waiting for this delivery for several months.
The bottling process itself surprised me. I expected to see some kind of machine in Marco’s cantina that would pour wine into bottles and cork them. Meanwhile, I saw a really interesting truck in front of the canteen. This Scania is worth around a MILLION euros! Because it is a mobile, standalone bottling station. Amazing device. On one side, we put empty bottles, on the other, bottles full of wine, corked and capped, came out.
The „production” line starts with washing the bottles which are washed and dried. Next, they are then filled with wine. Each of them must contain exactly 750 ml of the perfect drink. The next step is corking. We used Monotapo, a natural cork, for our wine. The corked bottle is still capped (this is the cap that must be removed before opening the bottle) and labeled.
As you can see, the process seems simple. However, a closer look at the truck that arrived at Marco made me wonder again about the genius of industrial design. How beautifully someone invented all this 🙂 Just so that we could enjoy a glass of excellent wine at Casa Portagioia.
