New High-Tech Bottling Line and Warehouse at Delicata Winery

Delicata, Malta’s most awarded winery, has recently finished the installation of a brand-new bottling line and the overhaul of its bottled wine warehouse. The company embarked three years ago on this major quality improvement project, which is a multi-million Euro investment part-financed through EU and national funds.

Bottling is a complex, delicate and decisive step of the winemaking process that aims to maintain the wine’s quality from the bottle to the table. If it goes wrong, all the previous hard work by the winemaker is wasted. A correct bottling procedure, however, will help guarantee a wine’s proper evolution while it remains in bottle. This requires not only professional expertise but also continuous investment in the latest technology.

Weighing in at 10.5 tonnes and measuring the size of a truck, the newly purchased computerised bottle washing machine must be Delicata’s most impressive new piece of equipment: a mammoth of steel whose sole purpose is the highly efficient cleaning of new and used bottles. It plays a pivotal function in running the winery’s own eco-friendly empty bottle return system.

The bottle washer was tailormade overseas and installed together with high-tech automatic microfiltration and CIP (clean in place) equipment, new bottle drying, filling, corking, capsuling, screw capping machines and top-notch labelling and other related gear. Each unit is an integral link of Delicata’s brand-new bottling line for which an extended hall with new floor tiling systems was built.

Whilst operating according to best practices for winery hygiene, water conservation and energy saving, the main benefit of the brand-new bottling line is that it reduces oxygen pickup during bottling, which guarantees the freshness of the bottled wine. The line also improves the aesthetics of the labelling and packaging of all Delicata brands.

Part of the winery’s project too was the installation of a 39.9 kWp photovoltaic system and the insulation of the bottled wine warehouse. Here the wines are stored energy-efficiently in a temperature-controlled environment until they are loaded on the company’s vans for delivery to customers all over the Maltese archipelago.

Delicata’s project entitled: “Achieving World Class Quality in Producing Maltese Wines” was part-financed through Measure 4.2 through the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development 2014-2020, Europe investing in Rural Areas as part of the Rural Development Programme for Malta 2014-2020.