Bottling yield: how many bottles and cases will a tank give you?

Before a bottling run you order labels, closures, capsules and cartons — and every one of them is counted per bottle. Get the bottle count wrong and you either run short mid-run or pay for stock you cannot fill. The maths is easy; the discipline is remembering the losses.

The base count

A litre is 1,000 mL, so a 2,000 L tank is 2,000,000 mL. Divide by the fill volume — 750 mL for a standard bottle — and you get a theoretical 2,666 bottles. At 6 bottles per case that is 444 full cases and 2 loose. Half-bottles (375 mL) double the count; magnums (1,500 mL) halve it.

Allow for losses

• Filtration and line priming — wine left in filters, pumps and hoses at start-up.
• Lees and tank heel — the last centimetres you do not bottle.
• Spillage and rejects — foaming, low fills, damaged bottles pulled off the line.
• A clean run on a small line typically loses 1–3%. Use your own historical figure — it is the single biggest source of error in the estimate.

Net bottles = volume × (1 − loss) ÷ fill. On 2,000 L of 750 mL bottles at 2% loss: 2,000 × 0.98 ÷ 0.75 = 2,613 bottles ≈ 435 cases.

Order to the real number

Round labels and capsules up to the net bottle count plus a small overage for setup waste, and cartons to the full-case count. Knowing the loose-bottle remainder tells you whether you need one part-case or a plan for the tasting-room singles.

In GrapeFlow a bottling run draws down bottles, closures and labels from packaging stock as it plans, so the count on screen is the count in the warehouse — and the finished product, with its QR, is ready at the end.