Choosing a wine bottle filler machine will become your right-hand helper in production, reduce human errors and improve production efficiency. Before that, let me give you a brief introduction to wine.
Everyone is familiar with wine. As an ancient drink, wine can be traced back to the ancient Persian region from 6000 BC to 5000 BC. In that distant era, people accidentally discovered that ripe grapes would produce an intoxicating liquid after natural fermentation. This magical drink gradually emerged in human civilization and became a regular on tables around the world.
With the massive increase in demand in the wine market, the ancient manual filling has become a thing of the past. An increasing number of individuals are pursuing high-efficiency and high-quality production. As we enter the era of Industry 4.0, several enterprises have evolved into digital factories. Wine factories have also entered the era of full automation. More and more factories have fully laid out automatic wine filling lines and upgraded them to automated filling factories. The automatic wine filling line is a key link in wine production. It involves transferring wine from storage containers to bottles and ensuring the process’s hygiene, accuracy, and efficiency.
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Introduction of Wine Bottle Filler Machines
The types of Wine Bottle Filler Machines
The degree of automation determines whether wine bottle filling machines are semi-automated or completely automatic. The winery’s production capability and scale determine the precise kind utilized. There are two types of filling machines: piston pump filling machines and gravity filling machines.
Wine filling machines now provide two bottle feeding options: rotating filling and linear filling. The rotating filling process is more widespread and reliable. Wine filling machines are typically used in tandem with bottle cleaners and corking equipment.
Components of Wine Bottle Filling Machines
Filling Heads: These dispense wine into bottles, generally with adjustable fill levels.
Conveyor System: Moves bottles through several processes, including filling and sealing.
Bottle Grippers: Securely hold bottles in place during filling.
Control Panel: Operators may set settings such as fill speed, volume, and bottle size.
Pump or Pressure System: Maintains consistent pressure for even filling.
Rinsing & Drying Modules (Optional): Some machines include pre-rinsing stations to sanitize bottles before filling.
The process of Wine Bottle Filler Machines
Wine filling is the process of putting wine in glass bottles. Common steps include cleaning and sanitizing bottles, pouring wine, corking, applying aluminum caps, labeling, and packaging and sealing. Some vineyards utilize completely automated techniques to carry out these procedures, while others use semi-automatic ones.
After disinfection, the empty bottles enter the bottling machine, automatically cleaning and draining them. The main purpose is to remove dust that may exist in the bottles. At the same time, draining water is to reduce its impact on the wine body; nitrogen filling is also performed before filling, the main function of which is to discharge the air in the bottle to avoid oxidation of the wine body in contact with air during the canning process, which affects the taste. The liquid level device ensures precise quantitative measurement and maintains consistency in product specifications.
Corks utilized for bottling are categorized into natural corks and synthetic corks. A small amount of air gradually enters the corks during storage, facilitating the maturation of the wine.
During the entire filling process, the wine body does not come into contact with the human body and air, minimizing the probability of oxidation and contamination of the wine body and ensuring the safety of the production process.
How to choose the Wine Bottle Filler Machine?
Filling accuracy
Filling accuracy is crucial for wine products because the inaccurate filling volume may affect the accuracy of the test results. You should check the technical parameters of the filling machine, understand its filling accuracy range, try to choose equipment with high filling accuracy and control the error within a very small range. At the same time, you can also ask the supplier for the accuracy test report of the equipment or the accuracy data in the actual application case to evaluate the accuracy.
Quality and reliability
Choose a supplier with a good reputation by checking the supplier’s qualification certificate, similar cases, customer evaluation, industry reputation, etc., and understand the supplier’s industry experience and after-sales service system, including whether the support for equipment installation and commissioning, training, maintenance and other aspects is in place; check the quality and brand of key components of the filling machine, such as motors, pipette guns, pumps, sensors, etc., so as to choose reliable equipment.
Production speed
In order to prevent insufficient or excessive production capacity, determine the number of products that must be filled per hour or day in accordance with the company’s production requirements and market forecasts. Subsequently, select a filling machine that can accommodate these requirements. Concurrently, it is imperative to evaluate the equipment’s sustainability and stability to guarantee that it can sustain a consistent production capacity over an extended period of operation.
Compatibility
Focus on the compatibility of bottles of different specifications and the compatibility of different wines. First of all, it is necessary to select the materials to be filled correctly, and then select the required specifications and sizes of containers according to the output size and packaging requirements, and understand whether the filling machine can easily replace the mold or adjust the parts to adapt to different containers. Secondly, different types of wine have different characteristics. Before purchasing, you should understand that the filling machine should be able to effectively handle these wines of different properties to ensure the smoothness and accuracy of the filling process.
Hygiene and cleaning requirements
The design of the filling machine should be simple to clean and disinfect, and strict hygienic conditions are required for filling wine. To prevent bacterial development and cross-contamination, select equipment with a smooth surface, no dead corners, and simple disassembly and cleaning. When purchasing, you should consider whether the equipment’s materials match hygienic standards, such as food-grade or medical-grade stainless steel. Additionally, keep an eye on the equipment’s sealing performance to stop reagent leaks or outside pollutants from getting into the product during the filling process. To guarantee proper sealing, examine the filling machine’s sealing structure and the caliber of the sealing material.
Automation level
High levels of automation in filling machines can save labor costs, increase production efficiency, and decrease mistakes in manual operation. When purchasing, you should consider whether the equipment has automated feeding, filling, sealing, and labeling and the stability and dependability of the automatic control system. Determine if the operational interface of the equipment is user-friendly, simple to use, and straightforward to maintain. Fully automated production lines are the ideal solution for wineries or wineries with high production demands, ensuring constant and effective output.
Security
To minimize operator injury and equipment damage, the filling machine should include all required safety features, such as overload protection systems, safety shields, emergency stop buttons, and more. To prevent electrical mishaps, we also need to assess the equipment’s electrical system to ensure that it has enough insulation performance and grounding protection.
