Visiting Indevin, we learnt about the opposite of bottling wine before shipping overseas. Sending wine in bulk. How wineries do this is by filling large flexis that can hold up to 26,000lt of wine.
Inside the shipping containers is a plastic bladder that is used to fill up with the wine. Indevin still run a day and night shift to fill the flexis, they can do 7 in two shifts and 35 in a week.
The process of filling does take a bit of extra time because they currently sterile filter before the wine goes into the flexi. This removes any unwanted micro-organisms that could really affect wine over long periods of time while sitting in the flexis waiting to arrive to its destination. But does take a little bit longer.
All wines are heat and cold stable before shipping, because of the extreme weather changes that the container will encounter during its long travels. I was interested to see how drastic the changes would be and after reading a research done by placing 3 shipping containers full of Chardonnay on separate spots of the vessels. The containers where on the vessel for around 60 days and the inside temperature ranged from 4 to 47⁰c. Huge changes and they found the peak temperatures were usually recorded while the vessel was at port during the day. Between the 3 vessel a fluctuation of 5⁰c was recorded.
Indevin does own all its wine until its time for the wine to leave the winery. They have 3 different styles of shipping and ownership. For example, when the flexi leaves their site it is no longer their ownership, also up to the departure port (FOB) and lastly once it reaches the destination (delivery at place). This regulates how much of the logistics Indevin must plan to get the wine from New Zealand to anywhere in the world!
By Emma Gordon
References:
Ann-Katrin Walther, D. D. (2018). Impact of Temperature during Bulk Shipping on the Chemical Composition and Sensory Profile of a Chardonnay Wine. The American Society for Enology and Viticulture.