Bottling Day at Piña Napa Valley

June 9th was bottling day at Piña Napa Valley. 

Since we're not big enough to justify having our

own bottling line, the bottling line comes to us.

Macario on the forklift.

Inside the trailer, things are a bit tight.

This machine is putting the foils on the bottle.

This machine is "spinning" the foils on the bottle.

We don't have paper labels, or the bottling line

would be placing those on the bottles, too.

Here are the large format Mimbre bottles. 

The Mimbre package design was the

first choice of 3 of the 4 brothers

(Okay, I'm warming up to it).

It's hard to visualize the size of the large format

 bottles from the pictures, until you place a standard

750 ml Cahoots bottle in front of them.

Our winemaking team:

Anna Monticelli & Macario Montoya

Photos provided by John C. Piña

Tasting Roomers visit Pina Napa Valley

Macario Montoya & Pam Bell

The Pina brothers have now been involved in 2 on-line videos related to the winery. The first was entirely scripted (by yours truly) from beginning to end. If you haven’t seen it, please check it out now at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmbm178fgf8 (It’s only 1 minute long). My good friend Tom Shirmang was the moderator and did all the talking. Well, almost all the talking. I said one word.

The second video was unscripted and courtesy of the Tasting Roomers. If you are not familiar with Tasting Roomers, here’s a bit of information I copied from their web site:

They made arrangements to feature Pina Napa Valley on their site. They provided us with a short list of potential topics for us to think about prior to their arrival. When we got around to the actual filming, I found out that each of the brothers would be interviewed separately. I was relying on my brothers to do most of the talking. So when Pam said I was next, I felt like I was back in high school and the History teacher had popped a surprise quiz that I hadn’t prepared for. I stammered a bit, talked a bit and left soon after speaking “my piece”. I almost told Pam and Jim that I didn’t need to be/shouldn’t be included in the video. But they did a great editing job and really seemed to present the brothers as we are. In my opinion, the star of the video was our assistant winemaker, Macario Montoya. I was so impressed with his casual, yet informative style, that I told him that I would be doing future interviews “over the phone”, and that his commentary would be dubbed in to make me seem smarter than I am.

Not too long after Pam & Jim came, we received an email from Pam:

Greetings Larry, John, Ranndy, Davie, & MacarioI just wanted you to know that the Pina video is now the featured video on our website. We hope you like it! We think it came out great and very much represents what Pina Napa Valley represents - hard work, real life, serious wine!
…

I think she summed it up nicely and captured it on film.

Please check it out at: http://tastingroomers.com/025-Pina.html

Nice work Pam & Jim!