New era for NZ wine industry infrastructure

27 June 2007

New era for NZ wine industry infrastructure

New Zealand’s wine industry is set for a major boost with the opening of the country’s largest contract wine bottling plant in Marlborough.

The Marlborough Bottling Company, which has now been in operation for 10 years, has recently moved to a new purpose-built plant in Riverlands, Blenheim. At 175m long and 18,000m2, the plant is capable of bottling 23,000 cases of wine per day, twice the capacity of their old plant.

To mark this quantum leap in the company’s development, and to reflect their robust national offering, from 1 July 2007 Marlborough Bottling Company is changing its name to WineWorks Marlborough. WineWorks Marlborough joins with WineWorks Hawke’s Bay in Hastings to offer New Zealand wine makers the country’s largest contract bottling and warehousing operations as well as industry-leading technology and expertise.

WineWorks now offers an overall bottling capacity of 34,000 cases per day and is the only contract bottler in New Zealand to provide winemakers with the option of premium Stelvin Lux closures along with a full range closure and labelling alternatives. In terms of warehousing, WineWorks provides 20,000m2 of finished goods storage and 260,000m2 of static bulk wine storage, along with a fleet of 12 tankers for bulk wine and juice transport.

WineWorks Managing Director, Tim Nowell-Usticke said the decision to build the Marlborough plant and re-brand to form a national WineWorks group was a reflection of the success of the New Zealand wine industry.

“Our response to the enormous success of our winemakers is to ensure they have access to the very best, on an international scale, in bottling technology and warehousing services. New Zealand wine punches well above its weight in the global marketplace and we have to provide our customers with leading-edge, first-class handling, bottling and warehousing, as well as laboratory services,” said Mr Nowell-Usticke.

The new WineWorks Marlborough plant in Blenheim features:

- A fully enclosed bottling and labelling hall giving ‘building within a building’ controlled atmospheric conditions;

- Three higher-capacity world class bottling lines using electro-pneumatic counterpressure filling valve technology; - Capability to apply Stelvin Lux closures;

- WineWorks Webspec system which gives wine producers secure stock control, specifications and dispatch control from their own offices; - Automatic wine transfer by pigging system from tankers and adjacent wineries.

ENDS

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