Video: Wine-Bottling on Wheels

More photos in our slideshow here.Dale Rassett is a unique kind of trucker, crisscrossing the Southern U.S. with his mobile wine bottling operation in tow. Hoist up the back trailer door, load the empty wine bottles onto the conveyor belt, and in a minute or two they'll come back out...

By Patrick Michels

March 12, 2009

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More photos in our slideshow here.

Dale Rassett is a unique kind of trucker, crisscrossing the Southern U.S. with his mobile wine bottling operation in tow. Hoist up the back trailer door, load the empty wine bottles onto the conveyor belt, and in a minute or two they'll come back out filled with wine, corked, labeled and ready to sell.

This goes way beyond the episode of Trick My Truck where they installed a fridge under the driver's seat.

Rassett somehow maneuvers his trailer around Lakewood's narrow streets to Times Ten Cellars a few times a year, stopping for a few days at a time. Last Tuesday was one such day, when the winery's sales crew and wine experts showed up in their rattiest work T-shirts and pumped the latest batch of sangiovese into bottles.

It's a fascinating mechanical operation -- a far cry, says co-owner Chris Lawler, from the manual labor of bottling in the winery's early days. After the jump, check out our video the mobile bottling trailer. (We've also got a slideshow of photos from the bottling trailer.)

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