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Bill's 70^th Birthday: A Week of Celebration Part B. Duplin Winery ******************* Last edit 2016-03-26. Note: As mentioned in the banner, this area of Southern Matters is private; if you are not a family member, friend, or invited guest, please enjoy the public areas of Southern Matters or exit. Thank you for following our Honor Sysem. This file may contain copyrighted material; the authority to grant permission for its use does not rest with us. Otherwise--for our original material--the following citation format is suggested: "Southern Matters, accessed yyyy/mm/dd."
General Introduction. One's 70^th birthday is a major milestone. When the opportunity arose to visit with family and old friends and extend the celebration to one week, the planning began. The activities are divided into four parts: A. Family Activities, B. Duplin Winery (this post), C. Monument of Captain James Outlaw, and D. The Faculty Distinguished Lecture at Meredith College.
Duplin Winery is the largest muscadine winery in the world and produces annually 1.4-1.7 million gallons of wine! As it was on our way from Wilmington to Raleigh, we took advantage of the opportunity to visit and have lunch. As we were soon to see, their scale could not be compared with Red Hills Winery, our private winery out back!

We passed through the tasting room to the cozy yard outside the bistro (above), . . .	and had lunch inside.

After lunch, we enjoyed the tasting room, but declined to make purchases because our inventory at home exceeds our demand. As we were leaving, a hostess enquired whether we would like to have a tour, and, of course, we were delighted to do so. At their operation less than a mile away, she began (above). Fortunately, she was well informed about the process, a fact that sets her apart from many. The first step is washing and sanitizing the grapes in the machine behind her. Then, grapes go into another machine (not shown) to remove MOG ("material other than grapes," such as leaves, &c.).	A subsequent step involves pressing the juice from the grapes. This press handles 68 tons of must at once. Our press handles 5 gallons at once! As mentioned, the scale and mechanization cannot be compared, but the process, overall, is similar to ours. We cannot duplicate, however, the fine control that a commercial winery is able to achieve, such as use of a glycol-jacketed fermentation tank, but have to make do with buckets in refrigerators. <smile> Duplin Winery uses filter-plate presses (as we do), but many commercial wineries sterile-filter, which is beyond us.
	Watching the bottling line churn out 65,000 bottles an hour was, perhaps, the most facinating part of the tour. Bottles enter the line, are filled with a no-rinse sanitizer, inverted to drain, then sparged. Next, they are filled with wine, corked, and fitted with a capsule and two labels--all at a dizzing speed and without human intervention. Downstream, two employees inspect every bottle, then manually put the bottles in a case, which speeds off on the remainder of the automated line for box labeling, &c. Whew! Our process is similar, but we sanitize by hand, rinse the bottles, sparge each with CO₂ using a tube (for whites, only), fill with an Enolita single-bottle filler, cap with a manual floor corker. Later, Nedra hand labels and melts the capsule in place. The same, but different. Thanks to Duplin Winery for the delightful and informative tour.
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