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Okay, so your wine is about to go to bottle, within a tank, you are turning up say Tuesday, 3:00 to see the bottling experience, but one of the decisions that we would have spoken to you about before that was whether we need to filter your wine to bottle. Assuming it is a red wine, the requirement or the need for filtering is pretty small.
Generally over the years, of the wine being in the barrel, the wine has settled and the wine gets racked from barrel to barrel every three to four months, so the wine is going to be pretty clear. We will use what we call a bug catcher screen from the bottling tank, which is a fairly coarse screen just enough to catch anything if it does go through, but basically, pin on wire, a lot of cabin is bottled without filtration.
If there is a need to filter, then we can put it through a filter, but for white wines particularly, if a wine has gone through mellow, there may not be the necessity to filter. You do not need to because it has gone through a mill electric conversion. It has high sulfur, assuming the wine is super clean anyway from its normal racking; it can go directly to bottle.
If the wine has not gone through mellow for white wine particularly, not a good management of risk if you would put it directly in the bottle. Because as the sulfur level drops down in the bottle, the tiny amounts of mill electric bacteria that are in that bottle can come alive and can create a wine that is quite spritty[ph] and frizzy. It also does not smell that well once it is in bottle.
So generally wines that do not go through mellow, we put them through filtration just to make sure that we get rid all of the bugs, and the bacteria, and any tiny mill electric bacteria particularly which may still be in the wine. It is a courtesy. The bottling line is sterilized with stain, the filtration unit is sterilized and we want to make sure that the wine that we are putting into a bottle is putting very, very cleanly.
We filter very slowly, and the process of filtration and this is the filter here which I am standing next to. The process of filtration is one where we very gently push the wine through filter pads and these are the filter pads that we use. They are actually made of paper; very, very, very expensive and very super clean paper. We pretreat them. We run a lot of water through them, which uses an acid solution to actually make sure that the paper is super washed and then we very gently pass wine through them.
I had been using plate and frame, is what they call the filter and these filter pads for 25 years. I am a firm believer in filtration that if you do it slowly enough, it has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the wine.
So, by the time we move the wine through these pads, we put into bottle, you can be sure particularly, if it is a white that has not gone through mellow that weakening that wine is sterile and it is clean as possible during the bottle to minimize any risks for you, once the cork has gone in.
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