Making Bulk Wine for Export

What are the key factors a winemaker needs to address when producing bulk wine and preparing it for export?

Exporting wine in bulk has been one of the growth areas of the wine industry in the past two decades. While bulk wine can be traded and transported in many volumes and types of vessels—for example, traditional négociants buy barrels of wine—bulk wine made for export is more easily defined by the state of the wine, and the volume and container used for transport. More definitively, bulk wine made for export markets is wine at a prebottling stage, transported in large-volume vessels, such as flexitanks of 24,000 liters, for bottling and packaging in overseas markets. The cost and environmental savings of exporting wine in this fashion have been two reasons why bulk wine has experienced such steady growth. The opportunities that bulk wine creates for importers and retailers to market exclusive brands have been another reason for its popularity.

It should be noted that bulk wine defined in this context does not include packaged large-volume formats, such as bag-in-box or kegs. These are finished, individual formats, ready for sale and consumption, whereas bulk wine still requires final bottling and packaging. In terms of volume, while smaller-volume vessels for exporting modest parcels of wine are available (such as Intermediate Bulk Containers and Spacekraft®), the use of these vessels to export wine is comparatively rare—primarily because the cost benefit of exporting bulk wine is harder to achieve with smaller volumes, negating that primary factor for choosing to export in bulk. Moreover, smaller bulk formats are less practical to fill anaerobically in comparison with the vacuum sealing of empty flexitank bags. Because of this, many of these vessels are also less effective than standard larger-format vessels at preventing dissolved oxygen from accumulating in the wine.

The key factors that a winemaker needs to address when making bulk wine and preparing it for export can be divided into three categories. The primary factors are wine quality and authenticity. Bulk winemakers must also contend with myriad operational factors to produce wine on time, and to the correct specifications for the intended market. A third set of factors that a winemaker needs to address are the intangible, human, and unexpected: thinking ahead with respect to the many people and stages involved in the winemaking and export process.

Wine Quality and Authenticity

For any winemaker, at any level of price and volume, quality is the key winemaking factor. That may seem surprising when discussing low-price-point bulk wines without the same qualitative reputation as wines in other categories, but qualitative standards are contextual. Winemaking should always aim to deliver excellent quality within the price category. Moreover, export trade is competitive: repeat business and export orders depend on winemakers delivering good-quality bulk wines to their customers. A Chardonnay Charmat-process sparkling wine that I made for shipping in flexitank (as still base wine) went from an experimental concept to a standard yearly requirement for the Australian brand buying the wine because of the reliable, good quality and typicity it showed at the brand’s sparkling wine price point—not because of Champagne-like brilliance. The importance of quality within the bulk wine category has also been reflected in the technical improvements made to transport vessels in recent years. These improvements—including, for example, more effective impermeable oxygen barriers and temperature resistance for flexitanks—have been developed primarily to preserve quality during transport.

Winemakers must also address authenticity when making bulk wine. It is important to achieve an accurate representation of the region from which the wine hails, and of the vintage as well. There are exceptions to this, such as the largest brands and labels needing consistent flavors across all harvests; this factor can negate character relating to the year of harvest. Additionally, winemakers may be tasked with closely replicating flavors and wine styles from other regions, suppressing the authenticity of their own region of origin to replicate wines from somewhere else. For example, the aromas and flavors of Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, New Zealand, now have such global market acceptance that bulk Sauvignon Blanc wines produced in other regions of New Zealand are often made to closely replicate Marlborough’s thiol-driven, aromatic style. Like most factors in the bulk wine export business, however, authenticity of a wine style in a well-made wine is important for salability, both for overseas buyers and for consumers.

Operational Factors

It is within the realm of winemaking operations that winemakers producing bulk wine for export differ the most from their peers producing small volumes of wine. Operational efficiency when making bulk wine is crucial: timelines are often shorter, analytical specifications received from clients may be more demanding or more critical to achieve, and keeping to predetermined costs is paramount. All these factors may be present in small-volume winemaking, too, but typically to a lesser degree, particularly if the winemaker has the scope and responsibility to make wine according to their own translation of region, vintage, and wine style, with the estate owner’s blessing. At bulk winemaking levels of volume, wine is produced for the buyer and market first, making their requirements key. The net result of missing specifications or shipping dates for bulk wine can be the cancellation of orders that equate to millions of liters, which could be worth several millions of dollars. For example, a succession of unexplained stuck ferments in 2019, likely caused by overclarification of juice during flotation at a subcontracted winery (so our winemaking team surmised after a joint investigation), led to a significant delay and consequent lost sales for one of our white wine bulk volumes of around 700,000 liters. Bulk winemaking combines the art and science of making wine, therefore, but is also a crash course for many winemakers in the logistical and fiscal aspects of making wine as a fast-moving consumer good.

Operational challenges are also highlighted in the task of achieving cold stability, which is a standard requirement for most wines, not just bulk wine, and generally the last step before final filtration. The options available to bulk winemakers to achieve cold stability, however, can impact both readiness for shipping dates and cost. Choose traditional cold stability processes (chilling wine to less than minus 2 degrees Celsius, or 28 degrees Fahrenheit, for at least two weeks), and the time needed to achieve correctly verified cold stability may be far more extensive than rapid shipping timelines allow. Traditional chilling can be sped up by supersaturating chilled wine with cream of tartar (aka KHT), yet this adds both significant expense and extra cellar work, increasing the final cost of the wine. Moreover, the chilled wine will still need to be warmed up after final filtration to meet correct temperatures for bulk shipping (12 to 18 degrees Celsius, or 55 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit). On large tanks of wine, this can take several days or even weeks to achieve (as the thermal mass of large volumes of liquid requires significant warming to move temperature), further affecting readiness dates.

There are more-rapid alternatives; additions such as metatartaric acid, carboxymethyl cellulose, or potassium polyaspartate can be used to inhibit tartrate precipitation, with varying degrees of effectiveness. There are also technical solutions, such as electrodialysis or ion exchange, which offer perhaps the most complete solutions to cold stability. While these solutions can prevent tartrate instability in large volumes of wine in a matter of days, even hours, they may impact specifications for the intended market. China, for example, does not allow several commonly used additions to inhibit cold stability, and all alternate solutions add upfront cost and additional cellar operations for the wine. A winemaker must ask whether these solutions can realistically be used. Cold stability may also be achieved by multiple processes. For example, the first shipments of bulk wine could be stabilized using a rapid method such as electrodialysis, with later shipments leaving under timelines that allow for traditional chilling.

Operational choices for bulk winemakers, even for a process as standard as cold stability, can be a minefield of market regulation, cost calculations, and cellar staffing factors. This continual weighing of factors often takes place throughout the bulk winemaking process. Making wine in bulk and preparing it for export, therefore, requires a thorough understanding of the market requirements and regulations, the end customer specifications (which can differ widely, such as requiring specific additives or additive limits), the correct analytical targets, the product cost, and the winemaking operations that influence all these factors.

The Human Factor

The complex processes of bulk winemaking are navigated by winemakers both during and after harvest, when working days are often long and stress levels correspondingly high, to achieve their targets and shipping dates on time. It is within this context that winemaking as a collegiate process becomes important. To achieve bulk winemaking specifications on time requires a large chain of winery- and office-based colleagues working in conjunction with the winemaker. In particular, the winery cellar managers, the laboratory staff, the quality assurance team, the export sales managers, and the freight-forwarder staff have significant roles to play. For example, liaison with the laboratory staff to schedule sampling and analysis on time, with time for repeat analysis where necessary, requires planning ahead, particularly if multiple samples must be prepared for specific sets of analyses.

This, then, is the final set of factors that a winemaker needs to address when making bulk wine and preparing it for export: as wine volumes increase, the human factor in making wine correspondingly increases. Operations or analyses that sound straightforward—such as laboratory staff preparing fining bench trials or quality managers helping complete Product Information Forms (PIFs, or electronic dossiers containing the specific ingredient, compliance, and analysis information of a wine)—may take several staff days to finish. Without these elements in place, bulk wine cannot leave the winery site.

As an example, in 2019, the winery where I was working as a bulk winemaker sold 28,000 liters of Sauvignon Blanc to an EU-based customer via a company brokering bulk wine. The Sauvignon Blanc was two and a half years old, and levels of total sulfur dioxide had increased during bulk storage as a result of topping up free sulfur dioxide levels to maintain stability. The client rejected our winery proposal of treating the wine with electrodialysis to remove excess sulfur dioxide and requested that the residual sugar be raised to 5.5 grams per liter, so that the total sulfur dioxide level met EU specifications for off-dry wines. With the EU requiring postfermentation sweetening via grape juice concentrate (not sugar), achieving this involved considerable work. Grape juice concentrate does not easily homogenize in wine and consequently should not be used where hyperaccurate analysis of residual sugar levels is required. Spectrometry for residual sugar analysis also requires expert sample preparation and user experience, with analytical results often varying by as much as 0.25 grams per liter. With the client requiring a variance of no more than 0.1 grams per liter, grape juice concentrate had to be added in stages to avoid overshooting the residual sugar target (requiring more cellar operations). Gradual sets of analysis from both the winery laboratory and an external laboratory had to be coordinated to reach an agreed-upon, verified level of residual sugar. This process took approximately five winery staff two weeks to achieve—and only then could cold stability be started (grape juice concentrate must be considered tartrate unstable, so must be added to wine before cold stability processes start). In comparison with our winery proposal of using electrodialysis—which would remove excess sulfur dioxide and stabilize tartrate precipitation in one pass, and which we knew would be less taxing for key staff—this was a complex, inefficient process, with the added expense of multiple sets of laboratory analysis. It was an example of bulk winemaking being subject to market requirements, client specifications, and liaison across client, broker, winemaker, two laboratories, the grape juice concentrate supplier, and the cellar team.

Conclusions

Exporting bulk wine is the culmination of strenuous checks, logistical pressures, operational complexity, and the collaboration of everyone from winery cellar hands to customs officials. For a bulk winemaker, dispatching wine is often a moment of relief, not triumph. To get to that moment, the winemaker must address a range of factors that, because of the pressure of balancing logistical and production demands, can feel like spinning plates. This aspect of operational winemaking is where making wine for bulk export often differs from winemaking at smaller volumes and higher price points—even though winemaking at those levels brings a different set of equally critical pressures and considerations. Yet ultimately the primary goal for all winemakers remains a qualitative one. The key factor that a winemaker needs to address when making bulk wine for export is to produce a high-quality wine at the intended price point. All operational factors are subject to that main qualitative winemaking aim.

References

Australian Wine Research Institute (website). “Cold Stabilisation.” Accessed June 17, 2022. https://www.awri.com.au/industry_support/winemaking_resources/storage-and-packaging/pre-packaging-preparation/cold-stabilisation/.

“Bulk wine trends focus.” Ecommerce Masterclass (blog). Swifterm, February 15, 2022. https://www.swifterm.com/bulk-wine-trends-focus-2022/.

Hillebrand (website). “Hillebrand’s 100% recyclable flexitank range.” Accessed June 17, 2022. https://hillebrand.com/flexitanks-pages/flexitank-range.

Swindells, Katherine. “Flattening tradition: Climate change and wine packaging.” The World of Fine Wine, June 30, 2021. https://worldoffinewine.com/2021/06/30/flattening-tradition-climate-change-and-wine-packaging/.

USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. “China Notifies Draft Safety Standard for Use of Food Additives as SPS CHN 1217.” May 20, 2021. https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=China%20Notifies%20Draft%20Safety%20Standard%20for%20Use%20of%20Food%20Additives%20%20as%20SPS%20CHN%201217_Beijing_China%20-%20People%27s%20Republic%20of_05-18-2021.pdf.

Vinex (website).“UK’s bulk wine imports outstrip those of bottled for first time ever.” December 17, 2020. https://en.vinex.market/articles/2020/12/17/uks_bulk_wine_imports_oustrip_those_of_bottled_for_first_time_ever.