In the vast factory I’m surrounded by the clink of bottling lines. Despite the huge space, there aren’t many workers, and most of them are either adjusting robots or zipping around on forklift trucks. Complex machines sit loaded with wheels of labels for some of the largest UK wine brands from Australia, California, Chile. This is Encirc’s plant in Eltham, Cheshire, where the firm bottles 337 million litres of bulk-shipped wine each year. And while the wine media rarely talks about bulk wine, it’s impossible to understand any of the challenges now facing wine – on the impact of tariffs, consumer demand or sustainability – without it.
The rise of bulk certainly marks a turnaround. The days when British shippers imported Bordeaux and Port and bottled them here – even First Growths, in the late nineteenth century – are long gone. At Lanchester Group’s Greencroft bottling plant, near Durham, one staff member said he’d left wholesaler Waverley’s bottling plant when owner Scottish & Newcastle closed it in 2007, telling staff there was no future for bottling in UK.
Yet today, bulk wine bottled here accounts for at least 40% of the wine sold in the UK, including 18 of the top 20 wine brands. That includes independents – one local wine store owner tells me 40% of their turnover is bulk-origin wines – plus a big chunk of the off-trade market (Greencroft do 18-litre bag-in-box wines for one major pub chain.) One senior bulk industry figure thinks that it can go higher, to perhaps 700m litres a year – which would be more than 60% of total sales. “We’re pushing the envelope and doing the next the tier up now, French Pinot Noir, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc,” says Encirc’s Robin Thompson.
So what does bulk wine mean for the big issues causing such angst in the trade?
For a start, while the main driver for the industry is the reduced costs of bulk shipping, there are clear sustainability benefits. Over a third of the CO₂ emissions generated by transporting wine are due to the weight of bottles. Instead, bulk wine is mostly shipped in 24,000-litre flexitanks, essentially a big plastic bag that fits inside a 20ft shipping container: Encirc take delivery of up to 30 a day. It is then pumped into tanks before bottling. Quality has improved enormously, especially in terms of oxygen control (God knows what faults shipper-bottled claret picked up with 1950s technology.)
Bottling is probably greener here than elsewhere too. Encirc is also a major manufacturer of bottles, mostly from recycled glass: they use them for bottling on site. Meanwhile at Greencroft, in a factory powered by wind turbines, all their bottles have been under 400 grammes for years now: reducing bottle weight to this level is a big focus of cross-industry sustainability efforts.
The benefits aren’t quite so straightforward. In South Africa earlier this year, RJ Botha, winemaker at Kleine Zalze, told me, “I have a big issue shifting bottling from a country with 37% employment to a relatively rich county. We need to create as many jobs as possible here.” He has a point, as one senior figure in the UK bulk trade conceded to me with some discomfort.
Conversely, at Encirc one wine I watched coming off the bottling line was Shore Drift Sauvignon Blanc, a brand imported by Cheltenham’s Off-Piste Wines and sold by Co-Op supermarkets. Intrigued, in February I tracked it down to its Stellenbosch source and tasted wines destined for the next vintage, from tank, with Pieter Carstens, head winemaker at Leeuwenkuil Family Vineyards. In nearby Malmesbury, where the grapes come from, Shore Drift’s Fairtrade levy supports a daycare centre and high-school fees for 15 children of farmworkers.
Bulk wine isn’t the sole answer to making wine sustainable – but we’re not going get anywhere close to net-zero targets without it. Likewise, while it won’t feature much in the drinking of most wine professionals, bulk is most people’s introduction to wine and what most of them still prefer – or can afford. We won’t come up with an answer to falling consumer demand or the changing tastes of young people without taking it seriously. For most consumers, bulk is good enough – in the same way that I drink lager which I know is industrial but does the job.
And while the whole of the European wine trade is frozen in the headlights of Donald Trump’s 200 per cent tariff, that will hit bulk exporters – especially in Spain – harder than most. It will be painful but high-end Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne producers exporting to the US can afford the price corrections that will surely follow tariffs. For bulk wines, as the buyer for a big UK pub chain told me recently, even a rise of one or two pence per bottle can make a crucial difference for an importer working at their scale.
Europe isn’t the only source for America’s 400 million litres a year of bulk imports – but producers in other parts of the world are nervous too about the toddler-in-chief’s next spasm. One big South African producer I met recently was pessimistic about the country being able to avoid US tariffs at some point. That’s not looking any better after Trump’s expulsion on political grounds in March of South Africa’s Washington ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool.
I’ll be honest: I don’t drink many of these wines – in common, I suspect, with most wine journalists. These days, bulk wines are mostly well-made – but there are more interesting bottles to write about. But I’ve realised that without taking this part of the market seriously – having respect for the mediocre, as Tim Atkin put it recently – we’re never going to move the dial on the big issues confronting the industry. Glass of South African bag-in-box, anyone?
Andy Neather blogs at https://aviewfrommytable.substack.com/. He is co-writing a book on wine and sustainability with Jane Masters MW, to be published this autumn by the Académie du Vin Library. Photo by Bruno Neurath-Wilson on Unsplash