Bottles, bottles and more bottles!

We have officially made the decision to bottle our 2007 a bit later this year.  Well at least I think we have.  It seems that every time I make a declaration like this something changes and we end up doing the opposite of what I have just declared.  So, now that it's out there, we'll probably be bottling next month! 

If we do indeed decide to bottle, it's ok since we HAD to take our 13000 bottles now, or lose them.  There is a huge bottle shortage here in Europe, last year one of the glass furnaces shut down and every since bottles have been really hard to come by.  So I got a call from our supplier, she said that they wanted to deliver the bottles right away.  I explained to her that we were going to wait until after harvest to bottle this year and so if she had to cancel the order and then re-submit it then, that would be fine.  She called me back a few minutes later and basically said that if I didn't take them now, she couldn't guarantee that I would have them in November or even in January, so I had better take them.

So that was another thing we had to deal with last week, making room in the cellar to fit 11 pallets of bottles!  We got up at 6 am to start moving pallets around and were just finishing up when the truck pulled up.  Now we can barely move in there, but it's manageable.  At least we know we have our bottles, now I'd better order the corks just in case!