Inkjet Printing On Champagne Bottles Aiding Traceability

It is experience and craftsmanship, that has allowed three and four generations of Ohlig in Rüdesheim to produce champagne for a sophisticated clientele that attaches great importance to get the highest quality and something special.

Inkjet Printing on the Champagne Bottle

The tradition-rich champagne producer in Rüdesheim has always been open to innovations and something new. A quality assurance system has now been implemented which ensures the traceability of the products. This requires a clear and durable marking. Rotary encoders from Wachendorff ensure the correct position during the printing while inkjet printers from KBA-Metronic make sure the print is accurate.

The company was founded in 1919 at the current location and has been growing ever since. Currently, 2 million bottles of champagne are leaving the plant in Rüdesheim each year – the trend continues upwards. The prime market is Germany but other countries are increasingly taking notice of the excellent quality of the German products.

In Rüdesheim, the finest wines are fermented to produce champagne. The 100 year old vaulted cellar below the company’s building houses champagne that was produced by traditional bottle fermentation. More hectoliters of the tingly, noble grape have been ageing in built-in or freestanding tanks and in barrels located all over the grand company building whose inside resembles a stately villa rather than a production facility.

Improved Traceability with Inkjet Printing

High legal stipulations for marking in grocery markets

Today, food is subject to a number of strict regulations for the protection of the consumer. This also includes the so-called lot identification that must allow the traceability of goods. The law requires the corresponding labeling to be clearly visible and readable. This is not a problem with smooth and even surfaces such as milk cartons. It is, however, much more difficult in the case of bottles. On the one hand, as a non-absorbing material, glass is a really poor substrate for printing. On the other hand, glass bottles are concave and also wet during the filling process. This poses special requirements on the marking devices.

Non-contact marking using fast drying colors

Heinz Bubeck, the technical operations manager of the champagne producer Ohlig, relies on state of the art technology when different kinds of champagne are filled from barrels and tanks into bottles. The critical factor is keeping the noble grape suitable for storage and fresh in taste by protecting it from oxidation. The modern filling facility is able to handle up to 20,000 bottles a day including quality control – and including the printing of the bottom of the bottle.

The problem with ink on wet bottles (running font) is a thing of the past. Thanks to the KBA-Metronic AG, Heinz Bubeck is able to do the coding without any problems. The specialist for printing and coding systems from Veitshöchheim integrated freely programmable inkjet printers from the alphaJET series into the existing filling facility. Figures and characters are now applied contact-free with pigmented ink on the concave bottom of the bottle drying immediately and completely. On the subsequent path of the bottle, the marking can no longer be washed off or smudged.

You can’t follow a bottle in the filling facility with the naked eye. At these high speeds, precision is all the more important. In order to have the bottle in the right position at the time of the coding, Michael Stingl, regional sales manager at KBA-Metronic, installed an industrial rotary encoder manufactured by Wachendorff in Geisenheim. Grippers lift the bottles, which are on a carousel, in succession so that the bottom is pointing upward. The rotary encoder measures the exact path that the bottles cover so that the printing process starts in exactly the moment when the bottom of the bottle passes the printing head of the inkjet. The bottles are then placed back into their original position and moved to the actual filling station where they are filled with excess pressure and then closed immediately.

Important elements of quality assurance

The last step in the facility then is the quality control. Here, another rotary encoder from Wachendorff is in use. A camera checks the filling level of the bottles. If there is too little champagne in the bottle, it will be pushed from the conveyor via compressed air. For the air blast to be applied at the right moment, a rotary encoder measures the exact path of the bottle here as well and will then trigger the air blast at the perfect time.

Thanks to the clear coding of the bottoms of the bottles, Karl Heinz Bubeck is able to see when the bottle was filled and he can also identify which bottles and which corks had been used.

For Karl Heinz Bubeck, the combination of flexible inkjet printers from KBA-Metronic and the robust rotary encoders from Wachendorff has delivered an optimal performance in practice. The low-maintenance labeling system is very reliable despite the enormous throughput of bottles. The cost for resources was even substantially reduced thanks to the low ink consumption and the standard solvent recovery of the alphaJET C-series.

The rotary encoders which are exposed to constant wet conditions within the filling facility – complying with protection class IP 67 - withstand the basic conditions without any problems. Thanks to a perfect combination of mechanics, optics and electronics, the Wachendorff products are one of the most reliable and most robust components currently available in this area.