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Cellar worker

The cellar worker takes delivery of the newly-bottled wines and stacks them manually, storing them on their sides in the cellar, separated by thin slats of wood (hence the French term sur lattes. Here they will stay for a period of aging that may continue for several years and in the course of which the wine will undergo second alcoholic fermentation — the birth of the bubbles and with them the aromas in Champagne.


Once the wines from previous vintages have come to life, the cellar worker supervises the following operations:

  • riddling,
  • disgorgement,
  • dosage, corking and wire-hooding,
  • packaging and labelling,
  • stacking in crates
  • shipping all over the world.

Modern handling facilities are essential for some of these operations — for instance, moving the bottles from one location to another and the management of a continuous inventory system.