Weddingbee Blog

We have wedding wine!

The week before the Husky-in-Laws came to visit, we received an email that our batch of Amarone was ready. We thought it would be fun to include them in the bottling step of the process, since they’ve been too far away to take part in a lot of the other wedding-related activities, like making invitations. I’m sure they were disappointed to miss out on those…

Anyway, we all headed up to Vintages Hand-Crafted Wines in Fort Collins to bottle our wine.

After our fermenting tank had been emptied into the filling machine, we got to work. We began by slipping the empty bottles onto the fill nozzles:

Both of us were relieved to discover that the filling machine was not only supposed to stop filling on its own, but that it actually did. Notice how I’m wearing dark colors? Intentional. Can you see how nervous I was here?

Next, we put the full bottle into the Pneumatic Corking Machine and dropped a cork into the top. When the door to the chamber was closed, there was a big whooshing sound, and the cork was shoved into the bottle:

After the cork was securely in place, we headed over to the shrink-wrap heater for the bottle topper. After spending entirely too long deciding which color to use (see all of our options right next to me?), we chose a burgundy wrapper with a gold top.

A quick slide into the shrink-wrap heater:

And they were ready for their labels:

(The guy to my side is Paul, who was ever so patient with us during the process of tasting and selecting the wine, and then later, the process of bottling it. Here, he is probably wondering what the heck I’m doing and why I’m making such a mess while doing it.)

And then, it was time to drink!

I cannot recommend this experience highly enough. Everyone at Vintages was so helpful and friendly. We may have sampled a few glasses too many of our wine, and the last two bottles we filled weren’t quite full (oops!). Instead of laughing at us and calling us lushes, they poured some more into the filling machine so our bottles would be full, and let us drink what was left after that! We had such a fun time tasting and bottling the wine, and we’re really looking forward to turning this into an annual tradition. Cheers!

*All photos in this post are personal photos

What kind of fun experiences have you had while planning your wedding? Have any of them led to a favorite tradition?