Tag Archives: bottling

10 Interesting Facts about Winemaking at City Winery

Posted on by Erica Swallow

City Winery and its team are quite diverse, partially due to the winery’s situation in downtown New York City, but also based on the winery’s multi-purpose use as a winery, entertainment venue, restaurant and tasting room.

Each week, we update you on the latest goings on at the winery. But we thought it’d be nice to take a glance back at some of the unique traits of our winery with a few fun facts about us. We hope you find these facts about our winemaking as interesting as we do!

1. When lees (that is, deposits of dead or residual yeast and other particles that precipitate to the bottom of a tank of wine after fermentation and aging) is removed from a wine at City Winery, we recycle it to the kitchen, where white lees is used to make pizza dough and red lees is used to make pretzels. Really dark lees can also be used to paint barrels.

2. City Winery’s Assistant Winemaker Bill Anton was a horse jockey for 20 years before joining the wine world!

3. We don’t “crush” grapes at City Winery. Instead, we simply destem and sort grapes before they are placed in tanks. This helps us maintain the integrity of the fruit as much as we can in order to optimize fresh aromas in the wine.

4. Press wine makes up about 25% of City Winery’s red wine production.

5. City Winery produces a number of kosher wines each year. The kosher winemaking process is overseen by the winery’s Kosher Assistant Winemaker Yanky Drew.

6. The Winery’s Barrel Room uses a house wine tap system to funnel up wines from the winery’s wine cellar. The system employs 11 taps and enables the winery to serve fresh wines on site.

7. At City Winery, we top barrels every 2-3 weeks to prevent oxidation. During the topping, we use the same variety of the wine being topped.

8. The City Winery team bottles and labels all wines on site. In fact, our in-house designer creates all of the wine labels used on our house and barrel member wines.

9. One barrel of wine fills 21 cases — that’s 252 bottles of delicious wine!

10. Because City Winery is located in Manhattan, it cannot be situated on a vineyard. Instead of growing our own grapes, we source grapes from some of the finest vineyards in California, New York, Chile and Argentina.

What else would you like to know about City Winery? Let us know in the comments below.

A Look at How City Winery Bottles Wines

Posted on by Erica Swallow


Assistant winemaker Bill Anton bleeds air out of the line in preparation for filtering wine that is to be bottled.

The City Winery team bottled 10 barrels of member wines on Friday. The wines spanned three varietals, including 2010 Pinot Noir, 2009 Petite Syrah and 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon.

While the winery bottles wines throughout the year as wines are ready, bottling activities ramp up right before the harvest season (which is quickly approaching), so that space can be made for incoming crops, as is normal for the entire industry. Wines that are not ready to be bottled prior to harvest season are racked until harvest crops have been taken care of, which is usually around December. At that point, more attention can be dedicated towards bottling previous vintages.

The winery uses a manual bottling setup that is powered by gravity and a handful of dedicated wine lovers. The wine is pumped from the barrel, through a filter and to 60-gallon stainless steel drums located on a loft in the winery. From there, the wine is pulled by gravity through a hose to the filler bowl (pictured below). The filler bowl distributes wine through its eight spouts into bottles — from there, the wine is corked. The corking machine is connected to a pump that vacuums out any oxygen in the eulage — the space between the cork and the wine surface — to minimize the oxygen’s affect on the wine’s aging process. Once corked, the full bottles of wine are set aside for capsuling and labeling.


Wine aficionado Henry Gonzalez, kosher assistant winemaker Yanky Drew and wine aficionado Hank bottle wines.

While many larger wineries use fully automated bottling and labeling equipment, much of this process is manual at City Winery. Automated bottling machinery is ideal for large wineries, but it takes up of a lot of dead space. As an urban winery, City Winery has limited space and tends to produce a number of smaller batches, especially with our barrel member program, which enables individuals and small groups to make wines by the barrel.

As a result, the team bottles and labels wines in two separate sessions to maintain high quality standards. This allows the team to “focus on the bottling and do it right, and focus on the labeling and do it right,” says head winemaker David Lecomte.

With a team of 5-6 people, the bottling process for 10 barrels of wine takes about seven hours. At the end of the day, that’s 210 cases of wines (or 2,520 bottles of wine) ready for labeling!

Let us know if you have any questions about how City Winery bottles wines in the comments below.