Increased demand sees opening of new bottling plant for North Coast

Increasing demand amongst up and coming vintners in Napa Valley has resulted in the opening of a new wine bottling plant.

Infinity Bottling is leasing a 35,000 square foot warehouse in American Canyon to fulfil the demand created by the expanding number of new winemakers muscling into the market. It aims to open in the first quarter of next year, according to Jessica Tuteur, Infinity’s general manager and partner.

She became aware of the gap in the market while working in her day job as operations and logistics manager for Plata Wine Partners, which sources fruit from more than 20,000 acres of premium vineyards. While there are numerous options on the California Central Coast for dedicated third party bottling facilities the North Coast has few.

“Over the years I’ve found that bottling is our biggest struggle,” Tuteur told North Bay Business Journal. “When you’re a third party bottler at a custom crush facility, you’re just really not a priority.”

She describes the way bottling is done in America as “30 years behind in automation and efficiency”, after touring a winery in Italy with a bottleneck capsule supplier. The integration of robotics for receiving, handling and packaging bottles and automatic quality control is something not often seen at third party production facilities, she added.

Infiintiy will be able to handle more than 150 bottles a minute when it is up and running, the equivalent of more than a million cases a year on a single shift, and will have a 2,500 case minimum job size.

Economies of scale in buying glass in bulk to smaller producers will be a big benefit, claimed Tuteur, with savings in the region of between 60 cents to $1. “It makes a big difference, when you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of cases,” she said.

In addition, the new system will automatically remove empty bottles from pallets to load them onto the filling line. The plant will also be able to work with empty bottles arriving in cartons, which is typically how smaller supplier receive them from suppliers.

Clients will also have the option of moving their newly bottled wines into storage without additional shipping costs, as the bottling plant is locaed inside a wine warehouse.