What a day...

Remember those bottles we were promised?  Well, it turned out to be a total nightmare.  I called the supplier at 9 am to confirm that we were the first on the list for deliveries and the woman said that he had already left and that he shouldn't be too much longer.  In the mean time, the bottler showed up and I led him to the bottling site. He started to set up shop and I told him that there was a slight problem, but that the bottles should be here by 10.  He explained that the time it took him to set up, even 10:30 or 11:00 would be fine, as long as it was before lunchtime.  There was another winery that was bottling some red just after us, but we had to go first since we had rosé.  We began our wait for the truck.  At 10:30, still no sign of the bottles. The bottler asked for the labels, corks, capsules, and an empty bottle similar to the ones we would be using so that he could get everything ready.  In the mean time, a whole team of people had showed up to help the other winery bottle their wines.  Everyone was hanging around waiting for us, so the pressure was definitely starting to rise.

Matt (whose trip to China was delayed) called the bottle supplier to find out where the truck was and she said she would call him back.  Ten minutes later when they still hadn't returned the call, I called back and literally blew a gasket.  I'm not a person that gets angry very often and I do everything I can to avoid conflict, but this was too much.  They were completely unprofessional and I was extremely angry, especially since they had been highly recommended to me by a friend.  Finally, I get the call I was waiting for and what does she say?????  The driver did the route backwards and he won't be at our house until 1:00.  I wanted to cry. I felt like a total idiot.  Here there were at least 10 people who had wasted their whole morning and now we weren't even sure if our wine would be bottled.  I asked the bottler and he, clearly reaching his limit, said that if they were there right at 1:00 he'd still do it.

At this point, everyone split up for lunch. The tension was a bit high.  We invited the bottler (his name is Mr. Fraison) out to lunch and he gladly accepted.  It was a bit of a difficult lunch. He was trying to be nice, but it was obvious he wasn't happy, and who could blame him?  Finally, the hour came and Matt went back home to wait.  Sure enough by the time we got back the driver was there unloading the bottles.  Everyone jumped into place and we got started.  Our friends Peter and Lucy were there, as well as Nick and of course, my dear sister, Molly, who flew down to help.  It was so very exciting to see the wine actually going into the bottles, the corks getting stuffed in, capsules going on, then the labels.  In all it took about 30 minutes to bottle our 550 liters. Incredible.  720 bottles is what we ended up with, not bad!

How exciting it was to have some of our wine finally in bottle, especially after that awful morning...

I'll save the rest for the next post, but I will tell you one thing about Kermit's visit.... 

He liked it!

Comments

[Terry Hughes]

MAZEL TOV.

[Fritz Krieger]

Congrats!!!!