As the wine business in California has grown, so have all the industries that supply the nearly 2,300 bonded wineries and the hundreds of virtual wineries in the state.

One of those businesses is mobile bottling — a bottling facility on a truck or trailer that is taken to wherever the tanks are that hold wine ready for bottling.

Many wineries with small production use a mobile bottler because the cost of putting in a bottling line in the winery can be prohibitive — a top quality high speed line can cost up to a half million dollars, and for many vintners, the expense cannot be justified, especially when the bottling line is used for only a few weeks a year, at most.

It’s not only small producers that use mobile bottling. Some of California’s largest wineries with high-speed bottling lines often use mobile bottlers for very small lots of wine, or just to supplement their own lines during long runs.

Some wineries have even built their own mobile bottling trucks which, they say, gives them more flexibility in bottling, especially those with multiple facilities.

Travel widely

Several mobile bottlers call Napa Valley home although they all travel to other wine producing areas, as far away as Santa Barbara. “I try to stick to Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and the foothills,” said Derek Palm, of Select Mobile Bottlers. “I want the guys (crew) to be at home at night.” He added that an occasional out-of-the-area job can keep them away for several days at a time.

Select Mobile is one of the newest and fastest-growing firms in the business. Palm built his first trailer in 2002 and added a second last year, and both are booked full-time. He serves about 130 clients, adding that most of them are repeaters, and works with several custom crush facilities, where many small vintners make their wines. “We do work for seven clients at one of them (custom crushers)” he said.

Palm noted the growing trend toward screw caps, so when he designed his second trailer, which cost just under $1 million, he installed screw cap machinery along with traditional corking equipment, and he said it’s been busy since day one. He estimates that screw caps will account for about 25 percent of that trailer’s total production this year.

Others use screw caps

Select Mobile is not the only mobile bottler that works with screw caps. Ryan McGee, which began bottling in 1995, built its third truck last December with a screw cap capability. “We had a significant number of requests (for screw caps),” said Mary McLaughlin, a partner in the business.

 Top It Off Bottling, which is now located in Sonoma County but was previously operated by Neyers Vineyards in St. Helena, also operates three trucks, one of which can bottle with screw caps, corks and even the new Zork closure. Last year the company bottled nearly 200,000 cases of screw capped bottles. 

Most bottlers have their own crews which are augmented with help from the winery or custom crush facility, and some use outside companies that specialize in assisting mobile bottlers, such as Norma Carrillo Bottling Co. in Healdsburg. But Bill Harrison, of Estate Bottling, who operates one truck, does it all himself and the winery furnishes the entire crew.

So does Eric Peterson, of the Bottling Room, who operates his truck with the assistance of his 88-year-old father, Pete. “He’s still going strong  at that age,” Eric Peterson said. “He’s amazing.”

Bottling capacities

Bottling capacity varies depending on the size of the truck and the type and size of bottles being filled. “Anything with long necks slows the filling process,” said Palm. When a bottle has a flange on top, the equipment must be changed. Select Mobile’s trailers are equipped with 12 different configurations and are capable of handling 375ml, 750ml and 1.5-liter bottles, with a wide range of bottle diameters. The only limitation — bottles cannot be taller than 15-3/4 inches.

Palm’s two trucks have capacities of 1,500 and 2,500 cases per day, while Ryan McGee’s do 2,000 and 3,000. Harrison’s Estate Bottling can handle up to 2,000 cases per day, “but I try to schedule it at the 1,500 level,” Harrison said. “There’s a cap on what I can do. There’s probably room for additional clients but I like to take a little time off now and then.”

La Petite Bottling, in Calistoga, operates at a maximum of 500 cases per day. Brad Aves, whose grandfather operated Yverdon Winery in Napa Valley (now Terra Valentine), put the bottling equipment from Yverdon into a truck when his grandfather died and the winery closed, and serves a niche clientele — “wineries that make four or five varietals in small lots, because they can bottle when the wine is ready, rather than when the truck is ready.” His truck is just 14 feet long — “That’s why I call it La Petite,” he said. “You can’t get big with a name like that. Many big trucks are just too big to get through the driveways of some of those small boutique wineries.”

That’s the same niche served by The Bottling Room’s Peterson, whose truck is larger — 26 feet — but still can get to many wineries that are unreachable by larger trailers. “It’s only nine feet wide, counting the side mirrors,” Peterson said.

Niche being eroded

The niche occupied by Peterson and Aves is being eroded, however, by the increasing number of  wineries that have built their own small mobile bottling trucks, and, when not using them for their own purposes, bottle for other small producers, rather than having the trucks sit idle. “I thought we had a niche that was safe,” Peterson said, adding that he’s concerned whether the growth in the number of mobile trucks can be sustained.

Peterson started as a winemaker, went into consulting and when that didn’t pan out as well as he had hoped, took a job with Chateau Bottling, now called Chateau Labeling, which does only that – applies labels to bottles. But that gave Peterson the impetus to build his own truck, which he did with the assistance of his father, and over the years has built five trucks, using some equipment from the previous one but always upgrading it. Maximum capacity is now about 1,500 cases per day, but that’s not typical, he said. “We often have two bottle sizes, and three or four wines,” and every one of those changes means downtime. “The typical run is 900 to 1,000 cases a day,” Peterson said.

Using mobile bottlers

In addition to the initial cost of establishing a bottling line, there are several other reasons why wineries use the services of mobile bottlers.

Many wineries that do their own bottling often find their equipment can be outdated, Palm said. “We work with some that have their own bottling lines, but the equipment is antiquated.” If a bottling line sits idle for any length of time, and is not maintained properly, or if the operator is inexperienced, considerable damage can be done, he added. Personnel is another consideration — Palm said it can take up to seven people to operate a bottling line.

A bottling line also ties up money. “They (wineries) can use their capital resources elsewhere,” said McLaughlin, adding that a bottling line is used only five to 20 days a year by most wineries. Maintenance is an additional cost. “They need a full-time mechanic to keep the equipment up,” she said.

Top It Off’s Randy Ramos added that a fair amount of space must be dedicated to a bottling line and that people have to be trained to use it. “To make it worth while, you need to do about 200,000 cases a year to make it pencil out,” he added.

Most producers today use pressure-sensitive labels and only a few, including Ryan McGee, are equipped to do both pressure-sensitive and glued-on labels. “Pressure-sensitive labels are easier to use and easier to set up,” Palm said. “You can do a lot more with pressure-sensitive, and with glue you’re limited in size. Pressure-sensitive is now the norm.”

Use of a mobile bottler doesn’t limit a producer of estate wines from saying so on the label, as long as the wines are actually bottled at the estate, Palm said.

Charges are fairly standard throughout the industry. Palm’s Select Mobile charges $2.15 per 12-bottle case, but if the line must run slowly because of an unusual bottle shape or for any other reason, “we have to charge hourly,” Palm said.

Maintenance is vital

All bottlers emphasized that a bottling line must be consistently maintained to be at top operating condition when needed. That is true for a mobile bottler, too.

To keep his trailers in top operating condition, “we are always in a maintenance mode,” Palm said, adding that something is done every day. “Down time is bad for us,” he said. He spends between $30,000 and $50,000 per year on maintenance. The bottling year is December to the beginning of crush, then bottling operations shut down, and the crews take vacation, while the owners use the time to perform major maintenance on the trailers. “We shut down for a complete workover,” Palm said.

When a mobile bottler arrives at the bottling location, it can take an hour and a half to two hours to set up. “We arrive at 6 a.m. for an 8 o’clock start,” Palm said. All mobile bottlers follow the same procedures — after hoses and electricity are hooked up, steam is used to sanitize everything, and a variety of filtration procedures are set up.

“Sometimes we put in 13- or 14-hour days,” Palm said. “They’re long days, but we’re bottling thousands of dollars worth of wine every day, and we have to make sure it’s right.”

Peterson agreed that the days can be long. He said the Bottling Room once was called to a large winery in Sonoma County that shut down its bottling line for maintenance and ran two 10-hour shifts for two weeks to handle the job.