Bottling wine – fast and gently

Constellation Europe's facility in Bristol operates two Krones glass lines for bottling wine. The glass lines, each rated at 24,000 bottles an hour, are equipped with Mecafill VKPV-CF fillers.

Advantages of the Mecafill VKPV-CF filing technology when bottling wine

• Thanks to pre-evacuation of the bottle, the wine is bottled without any admixture of oxygen.
• The filling valve enables filling to be run at high speed, since the product is guided onto the bottle wall by a swirl insert, and runs into the bottle with almost no turbulence at all.
• Thanks to automatic fill level adjustment, no manual vent tube replacement is needed when changing to a different bottle height.
• The filler also ensures maximised precision of the fill level, with a tolerance of 0.5 mm at Constellation. After the valve stem has closed, the servo-controlled return gas and correction tube is inserted into the bottle up to the specified fill level. The inflowing correction gas forces the overfilled product rack into the ring bowl.
• The automatic CIP caps feed capability enables cleaning steps at product change-overs to be automated.
• All steps in the process are electro-mechanically controlled and user-programmable, so they can be adjusted individually for each combination of bottle and product.
  The fillers are equipped for handling bottle sizes ranging from 0.175 to 1.5 litres.

A Pressant Universal 1N depalletiser is used for depalletising the bulk glass bottles. An electronic Variojet single-channel rinser is BLOC-synchronised with the Mecafill VKPV-CF filler.
Other building blocks in the line include a Checkmat FM-X inspection unit for monitoring fill level and closure fit, plus Multimodul labellers, each fitted with four APS 3 applicators for pressure-sensitive labels. Label positioning is then inspected by a Checkmat. Downstream of the carton packer is a Pressant Universal 1N palletiser for stacking the cartons on the waiting pallets. This harmonised concept for bottling and packaging wine has been completed for Constellation within the framework of a greenfield project.