We have been immersed for three weeks in the second most important job of the year, after the harvest: bottling. Very intense days and a lot of work. Bottling is putting the wine together with the yeasts and sugars inside each bottle of cava. We do the whole process manually and we bottle by gravity; this means that we do not use any pump and in this way the wine does not oxidize and enters the bottle in the best conditions. The sequence is: you put the wine in the bottles – we do it through some ‘spouts’ -, then you put the stopper (small piece of plastic), then we raise the bottles through a channel, and finally we cap them with a machine edgebander from 1961, but works very well!
All this, bottle by bottle, one by one.
Once they are plated, they must be placed – also one by one – in a horizontal position in the cellar. This process is called “making the rhyme.” We make the rhyme with wooden cans and it is a time of nerves because it is a very fragile structure that is supported by the weight of the bottles.
When they are already placed ‘in rhyme’, if everything goes well, the bottles will begin to make the second fermentation!
We hope that a very good cava comes out.
Maria and Carles
