Practice English Speaking&Listening with: L Mawby Vineyards: Riddling

All right,so today I'm talking to you about riddling.

And riddling is the process of moving a wine bottle from this position to this position;

all the while those dead yeast cells and all those particulates that are in here making

the wine cloudy are settling into the neck of the bottle.

But how do we do this? And why do we do this?

Well, for anywhere between 1 and 3 years for most of our wines, and upwards of 6, 7, 8

plus years for some of our vintage-dated wines, these wines have been sitting in a cage like

this, just in this position, aging, and creating all those toasty, wonderful aromas that we

all love and-- know and love in our champagnes.

So now it's time to riddle it. And riddling -- like I said -- riddling is that process

of turning all the bottles onto their necks so we can disgorge them, blast that yeast

out like I showed you a couple weeks ago.

So to do this we load them into a riddling box. Years ago, way back when, this was done

all by hand on a riddling rack. But nowadays, luckily, we have machines to do this so it

becomes much less labor-intensive. It's still a little bit labor-intensive because we have

to load the bottles from this cage

into a riddling box. And eventually this box will be full of bottles.

Just like that. And then our riddling machine will take this whole box and slowly turn it,

and at the same time moving it upright so all the bottles, in two days, will be on their

necks, ready to be disgorged. And that is riddling.