Wine Bottling Robot: ABB Arms at the Line's End

A wine bottling robot rarely touches the wine. The filler and corker handle that, and they have been automatic for decades. The robot works after them, lifting finished bottles into cartons and cartons onto pallets. This post follows bottling from hand work in the cellar to the filling line, then to the palletizing and case packing cells where ABB arms like the IRB 660 and IRB 360 FlexPicker could fit. For the vineyard side of the story, see our winery cobots post. The focus is the bottling hall, and what a robot arm adds there.

An automated bottling line at a winery near Geyserville, California, 2011. Photo: DimiTalen / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

From hand corking to the château bottling hall

For centuries wine moved in barrels, and bottling came late and by hand. Glassmakers blew squat, onion-shaped bottles one at a time in the late 1600s, like the one in the Museum of London collection. Until the 1920s bottling was usually the job of wine merchants, not of the estates that grew the grapes. The merchant bought barrels and filled bottles in his own cellar, so the estate often never saw the finished bottle. Every bottle in that system was filled, stoppered and handled by a person.

A late 17th century glass wine bottle, blown by hand. Photo: Museum of London, Kate Sumnall / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Mouton Rothschild dates château bottling to 1924, when Baron Philippe de Rothschild took bottling in house, partly to keep the wine at the estate through its aging. Decanter points out that Lafite bottled at the estate earlier, so Mouton was not strictly first. Either way, estates began to bottle their own wine, and that created new work: more storage, more labor and a need for repeatable filling. A cellar full of barrels like these needed a crew with a clear routine for rinsing, filling, corking and labeling each bottle.

Barrels in the cellar at Clerc Milon in Pauillac, 2012. Photo: Tomas e / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Machines arrived in pieces. A 19th century corking machine, like the one photographed in a cellar beside stacked bottles, pressed the cork in with a lever, but a person still held each bottle. A museum entry from Cyprus describes a semi-automatic filler from 1939: a pump fed wine to a tank at the top, and it flowed by gravity into each bottle up to a set level. The operator still loaded and removed every bottle, so filling got faster while the handling stayed with people.

A 19th century corking machine beside stacked wine bottles. Photo: Rob Stinnett / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Today's line ends in a robot cell

A modern winery line chains machines. Bottles are rinsed, filled, corked or capped, labeled and boxed. This cork feeder, from a small California winery, shows one of the steps that machines took over long ago. The gap sat at the end of the line, where cartons of heavy glass had to be stacked by hand. A wine case can weigh around 15 kilograms, and an operator lifts one case after another for the whole shift. That repetitive load is why robots appeared at the end of the line first.

A cork feeder pressing a cork on a winery bottling line. Photo: Agne27 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Martin Ray Winery in California shows how that works. According to Robotiq, two operators stacked cases by hand at the end of the bottling line until the winery installed a UR20 cobot palletizer with a vacuum gripper. It handles cases of about 15 kg at six to ten picks a minute, and the company reports payback in 18 months. Those numbers come from the vendor, so treat them as claims. Robotiq is not ABB, but the job is the same one an ABB IRB 660 or IRB 460 palletizer does in larger plants.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

On the ABB side, the IRB 660 and IRB 460 are palletizing robots, and the IRB 360 FlexPicker is a fast delta robot that places products into cartons, driven by PickMaster software. I found no source for an ABB robot on a wine bottling line, so what follows is a possibility, not a customer story. A FlexPicker could pack bottles or pouches into cartons, an IRB 660 could stack the cartons, and both can be laid out and tested in RobotStudio before any hardware arrives.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

Palletizing in beverage plants is already common. The photo shows ABB palletizing robots on the milk lines at Piracanjuba's plant in Goiás, Brazil, a reminder that the same arms and grippers handle cases of liquid across many industries. For wineries the difference is variety, with several bottle shapes and case sizes in one season. Packaging World has reported that Columbia Crest replaced a mechanical partition inserter with a robotic one that more than doubled the speed of its bottling line, which shows how much gain sits in the cartoning step.

ABB palletizing robots on the UHT milk lines at Piracanjuba's plant in Goias, Brazil. Photo: ABB (ABB Robotics magazine 1/14)

Smaller wineries, mixed pallets and what still goes wrong

The next gains are at small and midsize producers, which cannot justify a large conveyor system. Compact arms that fit an existing layout help, and so do recipe screens where an operator types in the case size, weight and stacking pattern, as Martin Ray does. Labels matter at the same end of the line, and our label applying post covers that step. On 13 October 2026 ABB launched the IRB 1700, which it says has a footprint 50 percent smaller than its predecessor. Its listed uses include material handling, so a small cellar floor is a plausible fit.

A corking machine in a small winery. Photo: Agne27 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Open problems remain, and cost is the first. Glass breaks, so grippers must hold bottles and cases without crushing them, and a dropped case is a mess. Safety fencing takes floor space, and a cobot that slows when people come near cuts its output. Closures vary too, from natural corks like the ones in this basket to other types, so a line that changes format often needs quick changeovers. PACK EXPO in Chicago runs 18 to 21 October 2026, and Mujin has announced a palletizing system for bottled and canned products there, so buyers will have cells to compare.

Used wine corks piled in a basket. Photo: Elisha Terada / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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