KASOTA, MINN. – As more and more wineries spring up, the operators have a good handle on how to grow grapes and turn them into wine. While the wineries need sizable investments in equipment, many can't justify the added cost of setting up a bottling plant as well.
That's where Josie Boyle and her crew come in, or rather drive in.
Boyle, the assistant winemaker at Chankaska Creek Ranch & Winery, heads up the winery's newest purchase — a mobile wine-bottling plant.
"Our line can do about 1,200 bottles an hour or 100 cases," said Boyle, who was bottling some of Chankaska's wine last week. "It's a nice size for the Midwest-sized wineries."
She said many small wineries will set up their own manual gravity-fed bottling lines, which are relatively inexpensive but slower. For larger wineries where such systems aren't practical, the mobile unit fills the need.
Chankaska purchased the mobile bottling business from another winery — Elmaro Vineyard in Wisconsin, across the river from Winona. The owners were retiring and operations of the winery were changing and they no longer wanted to run the bottling business.
Boyle said Chankaska was one of the customers Elmaro's mobile unit served. "We were about one-third of their business, so it made sense for us to take it over," she said.
"Just like their other clients, we were all in the same boat, we all depended on the bottling operation. So we're happy to continue serving those clients and have a little more flexibility in bottling our wine." They will bottle for a dozen other wineries in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.
